LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. Copyright No._.:i::: 

Shelf...ilOO 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



^oofefi! bp ©UtuarU Eotolau^ ^ill 



POEMS. i6mo, $i.oo; illuminated parchment 
paper, ;^i.oo. 

THE HERMITAGE, and Later Poems. With 

Portrait. i6mo, Ji.oo; illuminated parchment 

paper, $i.oo. 
HERMIONE, and Other Poems. i6mo, $i.oo. 
THE PROSE OF EDWARD ROWLAND SILL. 

With an Introduction comprising some Familiar 

Letters. i6mo, $1.25. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY, 

Boston and New York. 



THE PROSE 

OF 

EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 



THE PROSE 

OF 

EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

WITH 

AN INTRODUCTION COMPRISING 

SOME FAMILIAR 

LETTERS 




^si^smssm. 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1900 



TWO COPIES RECElVfiO, 

Library of Cor3grai% 
tlfflcu ©r the 

Mil?i291900 

Kesltter of Copyrigltfc 

57077 

COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



SECOND COPY, 






TABLE OF CONTENTS 



PAGR 

Introduction . . . . . . . vii 



JBiatttre 

Our Tame Hummingbirds i 

A Rhapsody of Clouds 25 

Cheerfulness of Birds 37 

The Red Leaves on the Snow ... 41 

The Earth-Spirit's Voices 46 

Human Nature in Chickens .... 51 

A New Earth in the Old Earth's Arms . 54 



literature anH Crittctfiim 

Shakespeare's Prose 61 



An Impression of Balzac 

Three Sonnets 

The Charms of Similitude . 
Books of Refuge .... 
The Most Pathetic Figure in Story 
German Lyric Poetry vs. French . 
The Clang-Tint of Words . 
The Objections to Spelling Reform 
Principles of Criticism 



86 
93 
99 
103 
109 
117 
123 
T29 
132 



A Private Letter 164 



vi Table of Contents 

Management of the Mind while hearing 

Music 179 

Can Tunes be inherited? .... 186 

Individual Continuity 190 

What do we mean by "Right" and "Ought" 201 

The Psychology of Interruptions . . 235 

The Bread-and-Butter Moments of the Mind 238 

The Slipperiness of Certain Words . 242 

The Ethics of the Plank at Sea . . 246 

The Mind as a Bad Portrait Painter . 250 

The Felt Location of the " I " . . . 254 

What is the Oldest Thing in the World? 257 

The Free Will of the Bonfire . . . 263 
The Invisible Part of this World we live 

in 270 

d&lmcatiDn 

Should a College educate? . . . .285 

life 

Wanted — a Friend 310 

Romantic Dispositions 318 

The Good Things of our Friend as his 

Compensations 3^4 

Choosing a Class of People for Extermina- 
tion 329 

The Left-Over Expression of Countenance 336 

The Nouveau Cultiv]6 33^ 

The Keeper-In and the Blurter-Out . 342 

Old Morton 34^ 




INTRODUCTION 

HE poetry of Edward Rowland Sill 
has been collected under three sepa- 
rate titles, Poems, The Hermitage and 
Later Poems, and Hermione and Other Poems. 
Although he wrote poetry with ease, and chose 
the form often for the expression of a mood, a 
passing fancy, a sudden thought, there was in 
his nature such a demand for expression that 
it was impossible for him not to use, and with 
the greatest abundance, the more facile form 
of prose. His prose ranged from the direct 
speech of letters to the careful structure of an 
elaborate essay; but whether he was writing 
informally or formally, there was little attempt 
to suppress that eager personality which made 
him one of the most animated of men of letters. 
Not that he betrayed the least bit of egotism ; 
the charming quality of his nature was his 
friendliness, which led him to give unceasingly 
to others and to take the keenest delight in 
comrades. It was this spirit of sharing his 
goods which made him examine himself as he 
examined nature and literature and music, and 



viii Introduction 

unhesitatingly deliver the result in terms of 
whimsical, earnest, and unreserved confession. 
He had an unquenchable curiosity, but it was 
so utterly devoid of envy, hatred, malice, and 
all uncharitableness, that it never excited these 
elements in others, and made him a sort of lay- 
confessor to many souls. And when he came 
to announce freely the results of his scrutiny, 
he made them so impersonal that the most 
prying neighbor could not have detected their 
origin, yet so graphic and shrewd that they 
were not lost in vague generalities. 

His habit of mind and his hatred of petty 
personality led him to prefer in most cases 
either a pseudonym or the still more grateful 
shelter of anonymity. He enjoyed especially 
the hospitality of the Contributors' Club in The 
Atlantic Monthly. The method of this table- 
talk especially pleased him, for it exactly suited 
his own way of dashing off impromptus of 
prose, mingled sometimes with ready verse, 
and the shortness of the essays permitted in it 
was adapted to the little flights of fancy and 
fun in which he delighted. He was therefore 
a very frequent contributor, sometimes having 
three or four diverse bits in a single number, 
and provoking by his light, incisive attacks 
more responses probably than any other mem- 
ber of that game of blindman's buff. 



Introduction ix 

It is largely from the Contributors' Club that 
the contents of this book are derived. That is 
to say, the greater number of papers is drawn 
from it ; the longer ones are sometimes from 
The Atlantic, sometimes from papers printed 
on the Pacific coast, and sometimes from 
papers read but not printed. The division 
under different headings is intended merely to 
classify rudely the mass of his prose writing. 
The distinctions between the parts must not 
be looked for too narrowly. Sill was so ver- 
satile and his mind ran so readily from one 
aspect of a subject to another, that it would be 
idle to ask for any very hard and fast division, 
but the grouping will serve to show something 
of the range which his mind took. No attempt 
has been made to indicate the sources of the 
several papers, nor to arrange the contents in 
any exact chronological order. These things 
are of little consequence in the case of so free 
a giver as Sill. One might nearly as well 
expect to date and locate a good talker's con- 
versation. 

For the sake of those who may be making 
through this book their first acquaintance with 
Mr. Sill, a brief account of his short life is 
reproduced here from the Note to the first col- 
lection of his Poems. He was born in Wind- 
sor, Connecticut, in 1841, and graduated at 



X Introduction 

Yale College with the class of 1861. He went 
to California not long after graduation, and at 
first engaged in business, but in 1867 returned 
East with the expectation of entering the min- 
istry, and studied for a few months at the 
Divinity School of Harvard University. He 
gave up the purpose, however, married, and 
occupied himself with literary work, translat- 
ing Rau's Mozart, holding an editorial position 
on the JVew York Evening Mail, and bringing 
out a volume of poems. His peculiar power 
in stimulating the minds of others drew him 
into the work of teaching, and he became 
principal of an academy in Ohio. His Cali- 
fornia life, however, had given him a strong 
attachment to the Pacific coast and a sense 
that his health would be better there, and 
accordingly, on receiving an invitation to a 
position in the Oakland High School, he 
removed to California in 187 1, remaining there 
till 1883. In 1874 he accepted the chair of 
English Literature in the University of Cali- 
fornia, and identified himself closely with the 
literary life which found its expression in maga- 
zines and social organization. Upon his return 
to the East with the intention of devoting him- 
self more exclusively to literary work, he be- 
gan that abundant production which has been 
hinted at, and which, anonymous for the most 



Introduction xi 

part, was rapidly giving him facility of execu- 
tion and drawing attention to the versatility, 
the insight, the sympathetic power, the inspir- 
ing force which had always marked his teach- 
ing, and bade fair to bring a large and appre- 
ciative audience about him. He lived remote 
from the press of active life, always close to 
the centre of current intellectual and spiritual 
movements, in the village of Cuyahoga Falls, 
Ohio, where he died after a brief illness, Feb- 
ruary 27, 1887. 

Some of the details of this uneventful life, 
and some of the characteristics of a very 
lovable nature, may be gathered from the fol- 
lowing extracts from his familiar correspond- 
ence. His letters were jotted down more 
hastily than his most casual writing for an 
open public, and suffer thus less from a frag- 
mentary use than would be the case had he 
relied much upon this form of writing ; but he 
was always, as it were, writing to his friends 
when he wrote his papers and brief articles ; 
these bits from his letters therefore should be 
taken as little more than notes. The effort 
has been made in the selection to trace some- 
thing of Mr. Sill's thought about himself in the 
successive changes of his outward life ; most 
attention thus has been given to the formative 
period, though indeed that term might well be 



xii Introduction 

applied to his entire life, so open did he keep 
all the inlets into his mind and heart. Some 
of the letters or parts of letters are taken from 
the Memorial i^riYditely printed in 1887. 

TO H. H. 

Sacramento, April 2, 1862. 

Dear Henry, — Arrived — so soon — safe 
and well — oughtn't I to be thankful, after 
such a voyage ? We landed in San Francisco 
last week Tuesday, March 25, — as to Shears, 
glad to get ashore — as to me, rather sorry, for 
I enjoyed the voyage exceedingly, and dreaded 
to meet my dubious prospects on shore. Not 
that Shears didii^t enjoy it — for he did^ hugely, 
— but he 's got a home, you know, in San 
Francisco, and has something to do — viz., 
the law. By the way, he 's got a very pleasant 
home there, too — father, brother, brother's 
wife and brother's baby — the latter being the 
prettiest extant. 

The life at sea just suited me — giving me a 
sound digestion, a deliciously pure atmosphere 
to see the stars through, and that utter seclu- 
sion which has always been my longing — 
secure, too, from any haunting restlessness to 
be doi?ig something — that relentless feeling, 
you know, which is always jogging your elbow 
whenever you get fixed comfortably in a self- 



Introduction xiii 

ish, idle seclusion, whispering, "Get up and 
go to work ! fellow-men — fellow-men — go 
to work — go to work ! " But out there I 
could rJtdiO anything, nor have anything to do 
with anybody, if I tried — so I took my ease 
with a good conscience. Well, we had a good 
time, and it did us good — is n't that a pretty 
satisfactory report ? 

We did n't write the book, for we concluded 
(not without serious talks on it) that we had n't 
enough worthy material for a book. You say 
Pshaw ! at that — I can hear you with great 
distinctness, way off here — but though there 
were specious and tempting considerations in 
favor of it, the sober and reasonable course 
was 7iot to — and so we did n't. I kept a 
pretty full journal, which you may read if 
you '11 come out here. I wish I had you here 

— I 'd tell you everything I saw and did and 
thought on the way — but as that can't be, I '11 
scribble this sheet full and wait till I see you 

— which won't be many years — for you will 
be in New England I hope, and I shall be 
back in two years or less. Well, we got off, as 
you know, December 9, into a fogbank — out 
of which came forth a roaring gale, which did 
make us seasick — oh, it did — I hope Shears 
will write you about it — I'm not equal to the 
occasion. After the first fortnight, though, we 



xiv Introduction 

mounted our sea legs and never got off them. 
Wonder if you 'd look out our course on a map 
if I gave it to you ? Here 't is, anyway. 

Frank K. writes that you are class poet. I 
am very glad — it 's a very pleasant thing to 
have, and I am glad they had the sense to do 
it. Don't "put off" now — mind you don't. 
I hope that you will do a better thing than I 
did — something that will have a good influ- 
ence. Don't say anything you are not sure is 
true — for there is enough certain truth. God 
bless you in that as in everything. 

TO THE SAME 

July 24. 
Dear Henry, — I wrote you a long letter 
when I first arrived here, which perhaps never 
has reached you — for I sent a good many 
about that time by the overland route, some of 
which I know were not received. Your letter 
to Sex and me came in due season — but I 
have been hoping that mine would at last get 
to you, and that I should hear from you again 
by this time. I don't think it 's best to wait 
any longer, though. I have no idea where you 
will be by the time this has reached the States, 
but I shall inclose it to Frank, trusting to his 
knowing of your whereabouts. I want to hear 



Introduction xv 

all about the winding up of your College life 

— and about the Poem — and the Poem — 
Have n't you sent me one ? If you have n't 
sent several to me, you deserve stripes — for 
*' private distribution " you know, as well as 
the one for public reading. And after all our 
ponderings, what are you going to do ? and 
where ? Study law at Harvard, I rather hope. 

As for me, I have come to it finally, like all 
the rest of 'em — I am to study law. And 
what a lawyer I shall make ! I suppose I am 
one of the first, though, who ever determined 
on that profession for the benefit it would be 
to himself spiritually. Yet that 's my crotchet. 
We are (some people don't seem to be — but 
you and I and a few of us certainly are) 
planted down in the midst of a great snarl and 
tangle of interrogation points. We want to find 

— we must find — some fixed truth. Either we 
are wrong and the vast majority of thinkers 
right, or they are wrong, and we right — and 
that, too, not on one point, but a thousand — 
points of the vastest scope and importance. 
As Kingsley puts it, we are set down before 
that greatest world-problem — " Given Self, to 
find God." So, considering that for such tasks 
the mind needs every preparation, skill and 
practice in drawing close distinctions, subtile- 
ness in detecting sophistry, strength and pa- 



xvi Introduction 

tience to work at a train of thought continu- 
ously long enough to follow its consequences 
clear oict, and some systematized memory (if 
for nothing but holding and duly furnishing 
your own thoughts when needed) — I say, 
seeing no better — or rather, no other — way 
to gain these but by entering the law, thither- 
wards I have set my face. I have sifted it all 
down to this conclusion — that in teaching, or 
in Literature, or even in following up some 
chosen science (much less some chosen art, 
as Poetry), the mind would not get fitted for 
that serious work which is before it. In them, 
it might become cultivated, stored with know- 
ledge, in some sense developed — but not dis' 
ciplined. Now just take that one question 
alone — Is Christianity true? What impu- 
dence it would be in us to consider that settled 
in the negative, until we felt that our intellects 
were as strong, as capable of close, protracted 
reasoning, as little liable to be misled by 
sophistry, as all those greatest men who have 
time after time settled it for themselves in the 
affirmative. I for my part can see no way in 
which I can at the same time earn a living, 
and get the active Powers of my mind thor- 
oughly disciplined, except by studying law. . . . 



Introduction xvii 



TO THE SAME 



March 26, 1864. Saturday night. 
Dear Hen, — It is only one of many disad- 
vantages of letters, as a voice between friends, 
that each letter can be merely the representa- 
tion of one particular mood. And if it so hap- 
pens, by an accidental trick of circumstances, 
that all one's letters are written at the same 
hour of the day, and therefore under the influ- 
ence of one and the same mood, he will get 
only one little aspect of himself conveyed to 
his friend. Such seems to be my fate. I 
write always in the evenings (unless occasion- 
ally I happen to wedge in an hour Sunday 
somewhere) after being wearied by the doings 
(and getting-done-to's) of the day. Conse- 
quently I suppose I always seem to you to be 
tired and depressed. Which result is unde- 
sirable. Because it is always — must be — dis- 
agreeable to an honest person, the idea of ob- 
taming commiseration under false pretenses, 
and partly because, next to fully knowing — 
understanding — my Beloveds, I like to have 
them understand the whole of me — 2ind to 
be always thought of as a broken reed one 
does n't like. Now this is not pride — which I 
am trying to express — not the kind of feeling 
which made us when little chaps hold in under 



xviii Introduction 

indignities, and swear we did n't care a bit, 
and go behind the door to snivel unseen — but 
it is only just as I said — a fervid desire to be 
known by, as I would know, the few nearest. 

I wonder if it ever is actually to happen 
that our broken threads of relationship shall 
be joined again. It is just like the "faults" 
they come to in mining — the strata run 
along, you know, side by side till — plump ! 
they come up against a wall of partition — and 
the question is then, do they go on again to- 
gether on the other side, beyond? and if so, 
how far must we go before coming to the junc- 
tion again ? 

Next month I am going to " move " — shall 
quit the Post Office, and go up to a little town 
some twenty miles north of Sac. — Folsom — 
{Foolsom — in the barbarous dialect of the 
natives here — I don't know but the name is 
a fearful augury of my wisdom in going there.) 
Goes I there into a Bank — changing my de- 
lightful employment of peddling postage-stamps 
{stomps — they call 'em here) for that of buying 
gold dust from Mexicans, Digger Indians, and 
Chinamen, who are all great at the " surface- 
mining " in that vicinity. 

California (so far as that means the natural 
and not the human aspect thereof) is inexpres- 
sibly beautiful just now. The trees are all 



Introduction xix 

just " out," in their spring vesture — the fields 
full of flowers — nobody has any right to talk 
about fields carpeted with flowers, till he has 
seen them here, or, I suppose, in the still 
more Tropical climates. Great gorgeous fel- 
lows, you know — like all the conservatories 
you ever saw broken loose and romping over 
the wild plains here, exulting and irrepressible. 
And not only these superb sorts, but come to 
stoop down and look closer you find multitudes 
of the least wee blossoms — little stars, scarcely 
bigger than a pin's head, blue, and pure white, 
perfect as gems. Only so for a couple of 
months or three months — then the parching, 
rainless summer bakes the ground, and browns 
the dry grass to a monotonous tint that makes 
one hot and thirsty even to look at it. 

And as with the vegetation, so with the chil- 
dren born here. Little human blossoms, such 
as one rarely sees in the cold Atlantic States. 
Mites of girls, with complexions like porcelain 
which you look at the light through — and soft, 
beautiful eyes. And little boys, fair and deli- 
cate as girls — bright and gentle, but so fragile 
looking that it seems as though to speak sud- 
denly to them would shock them out of exist- 
ence. They come around to my Post Oflice 
windows, toddling bits of creatures, asking for 
letters as sedate and grave as old men — and 



XX Introduction 

trotting off with them in their little hands, the 
letter almost as big as the sprite that carries it. 
Whereat the clerk, Sill, pokes his head con- 
templatively through the window, and marvels 
at the climate which produces such things. 

So ! and now you owe me two letters. 

Good-night to both of you. 

TO THE SAME 

February 28, 1865. 

Dear Henry, — I 've been reading Theology 
lately. You spoke of the legion of things 
which claim our attention — verily, verily. But 
moral philosophy stands first — then meta- 
physics — then down, to medicine, literature, 
sociology, KaAology, history, etc. I keep a 
little fountain babbling and plashing in my 
brain, by reading, nearly every day, a word of 
Tennyson or Browning (Mrs. I mean) or 
Ruskin or Bible or somebody. I would like 
to take your arm and start on a trip through 
moral philosophy, by evenings. How I want 
to see you and your pearl. 

I '11 leave this as just a note — for reminder. 
I want to learn the organ when I come East. 
What will it cost me, besides time .-* It is in 
me if I do not get too old before it can come 
out. 

Love to vos — Yours. 



Introduction xxi 

TO THE SAME 

San Francisco, August 6, 1865. 

People think that a thinking man's specula- 
tions about religion, etc., interfere with his 
daily life very little — but how certain conclu- 
sions do take the shine out of one's existence ! 
These Spencer chaps may be very excellent — 
but to me there is an apple of Sodom smack 
about it all — Little pigmies — what kind of 
babbling is this for worm-meat to emit ? " For 
man " (not even with a capital m) " is not as 
God." And I more than suspect that the said 
worms lick their chaps over the brain, as over 
the common tidbits of the grave. 

I send a pamphlet containing a pome by me. 
It is only the drippings of some very few and 
lean weeks, when I had too much dragging 
business work to do for any poetry to come 
out of it. They thought it extraordinary out 
here though. 

TO THE same 

Oakland, June 17, 1866. 
Sunday, P. M. 

Dear Henry, — Steamer sails to-morrow, 
and I want to send one of my usual unsatis- 
factory and hasty scrawls as a mere sprawl to 
show that I 'm still alive, and that however 



xxii Introduction 

little else there may be in my mind at any 
given time, you at least are in it. I have been 
loafing all the afternoon so far, and feel ex- 
ceedingly idle and good for nothing. Have 
been lying on my back and talking with Shears 
on all the subjects in the Universe one after 
the other, as the tide of two lazy minds drifted 
us — not enough headway on to steer by, and 
so floated through politics, religion, education, 
social progress, etc. Wish you could have been 
here to take the stroke oar. I 've been writ- 
ing a lot of poetry. Shall want to consult with 
you about it when I see you. Have got one 
poem of about a thousand lines and a lot of 
short ones, about as much more, enough to 
make a gay little vol. if illustrated a little, and 
got out nicely — but as to the inside, don't 
know — the more I write the less satisfied I 
am with any of my doings in poetry — verily, 
art is different from handicraft as Grimm says 
— only the perfect works ought to be given to 
the public — a bad boot or a tolerable article 
of cloth may be worth offering for sale, but 
when it comes to offering tolerable art — after 
Tennyson and the Brownings — 't won't do — 
a poor devil ought to be hung for doing it, 
unless he be very poor, when his punishment 
might be commuted into imprisonment for life 
with only Tupper and the Country Parson for 



Introduction xxiii 

food and drink — in the way of stale toast 
or so. 

I 'm reading Marx's " Musical Composition." 
Ever read it ? and do you cultivate music any 
now ? You ask (by the way, you have persist- 
ently, and without the least provocation on my 
part, written uniformly jolly and good letters — 
may your reward be great some day — though 
I don't see how it 's to come) what I — we — 
want to do when we get on there, with the 
view of cultivating the ground a little for us 
two old seeds to plant ourselves in. 

I can't tell at all till I have got there, found 
how my health is going to be, how much chance 
of literary success there is for me, how much 
of musical, and more than all, till I have been 
out to Ohio and seen my friends there. 

I can't ever preach — that has slowly settled 
itself in spite of my reluctant hanging on to 
the doubt. I can't solve the problems — only 
the great schoolmaster Death will ever take 
me through these higher mathematics of the 
religious principia — this side of his schooling, 
in these primary grades, I never can preach. 
I shall teach school, I suppose. 

How gay it will be to see you ! How we 
will enjoy renewing all the past except the 
nonsense and absurdities of it. 



xxiv Introduction 

I will leave the rest of this blank for the 
squire to add on to-night. 
Vale, old soul. Yrs. 

TO THE SAME 

Cambridge, April 12, 1867. 
Friday morning. 

Dear Henry, — There seems to be a gap, 
just in here, after reading the quantum of Plu- 
tarch, when there is nothing that must be did 
— so I '11 employ it to keep up our acquaint- 
ance. 

I got a note from Taintor yesterday with 
his card — 229 Broadway — calling for songs. 
Sent him one batch thro' you, and a batch and 
botch of one this morning. I hope the Tain- 
torian brain is not shrewd enough to detect 
the fact that they are trash of the first water 
(or as Sex says on a late occasion, of the first 
milk-and-water). By the way, vide "Galaxy" 
of April 15 — Translation by Sex of Lessing's 
" Ring " — good thing. Good joke on me that I 
send to the " Galaxy " and get kicked, and my 
chum gets accepted. If I c'd lick him I w'd, but 
he boxes me out of time hitherto. I can beat 
him at Base Ball tho', and mildly whopped 
him yesterday at quoits. He officiated at 
Prayers yesterday evening for the first time 
and did it first-rate. My turn comes to-night. 



Introduction xxv 

I am enjoying my opportunities here hugely. 
They give me books and let me alone — what 
more could a man ask ? Besides some good 
lectures outside — Agassiz, etc. I went to a 
sacred concert last Sunday night in Music 
Hall. It was very fine. I don't know that I 
ever enjoyed music so much. Didn't hear the 
great organ though, so I am going over to hear 
that in an orchestral concert this p. m. Sun- 
day night there was glorious orchestra music, 
and Arbuckle had a cornet arrangement of 
Adelaide with orchestra which nearly drew my 
heart out of my body. I have always raved 
about that song, but never heard it perfectly 
given before. What a splendor brass is when 
exquisitely played. How it winds and winds 
into one's very Ego, and tangles itself up with 
the emotions and passions and soars up with 
them. The wood sings all around one — the 
strings wail and implore to us — but the brass 
enters in and carries one off bodily. Do you 
concur "i I want to hear that great organ — it 
was music only to look at it — a great, dark, 
shadowy cathedral looming up at the end of 
the immense Hall — Apollo Belvidere up in a 
niche opposite, looking scornful, as if to say 
that all that solemn, shadowy, bitter-sweet mu- 
sic — the heart-broken triumph — the fire of 
tears — is poor by the side of his memories of 



xxvi Introduction 

the Greek health and energy, and music that 
was sunshine dissolved in wine. But one looks 
back to the statue of the Master in front of the 
organ, and thinks the man is truer than the 
false god. 

Delightful spring weather — trees coming 
out — grass green. Nature is all under good 
subjection though about here — not even a 
Tutor's Lane to refresh the wild part of a 
man. 

Wisconsin gone for Woman Suffrage ! It 's 
gay, is n't it — Massachusetts must hang her 
head and be second chop hereafter. 
Yours ever, 

E. R. Sill. 

I think pomes must be anonymous. Are 
you going to arrange for summer ? 

TO THE SAME 

Cuyahoga Falls, August, 1867. 
Sunday, P. m. 

Dear Henry, — I wonder how and where 
this hot afternoon finds you. It is too hot 
here to do anything, yet I am moved to write 
you a sweltering word or two. 

I have determined not to return to Cam- 
bridge. There could be no pulpit for me after 
going through there, except as an independent 
self-supported minister, which of course is open 



Introduction xxvii 

to any one with a purse. I came reluctantly 
to that conclusion. Another person, even with 
my opinions in Theology, might have judged 
differently. It is no sentimentalism with me 
— it is simply a solemn conviction that a man 
must speak the truth as fast and as far as he 
knows it — truth to hi7n. I may be in error — 
but what I believe is my sacred truth, and must 
not be diluted. When I get money enough to 
live on I mean to preach religion as I believe 
in it. Emerson could not preach, and now I 
understand why. 

So, the alternatives. 

School-teaching always has stood first. No 
decent salaries in this country. No freedom 
to follow my own way. No position available 
so far as I know. Hence, California. 

TO c. T. H. p. 

[Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio,] 
January 23, 1870. 

Dear Chief, — I am very glad to have you 
writing to me again about the Oakland matter, 
chiefly because it continues to let me know 
that you would like to have me come back 
there among you. I am queer, I 'm afraid, 
about my way of looking (or not looking) at 
future plans. Whether it springs most from 
faith, or a Mussulman sort of " fatality " de- 



xxviii Introduction 

spair of individual planning and trying, I let 
the future alone more than most seem to : per- 
haps too much. Except as it affects the con- 
venience of others who may hinge more or 
less on our edges, I don't see much advantage 
in taking thought far ahead, especially as to 
details. 

Wherever I am, and hovi^ever, I mean to try 
to do and be certain things (especially the do- 
ing ; for I find, looking at my life a week at a 
time, that has been the core, nowadays) but 
the where and how I leave till the last minute. 
So I know I am to be here till July next, and 
beyond that I don't look, except that your 
words about Oakland bring to mind vividly 
that 't would be very pleasant to be there. 

I 'm not fitting very fast to be good in any 
one department of teaching. I am scattered 
all over my school here, and with 128 scholars, 
and. all manner of branches, Lat, Gk., German, 
Chemistry, Hist., Geog., Arith., Astron. and 
the beginnings of everything else a'most, you 
see how good a chance I have to be anything 
in particular. I am a miserable smatterer, and 
likely to be ; getting my lessons for each day 
ahead, and not making any very profitable ac- 
quisitions, except perhaps about boy and girl 
nature in general. 

I would like to have a window opened 



Introduction xxix 

through which I might get a draft of fresh 
communion with the lives of you folks there. 
Can't you appoint some one of the crowd as 
sec'y to write me what you do and what it is 
all about, from week to week ? And when I 
say " crowd " I remember that after all there 
are but few of you. 

Strange that on such a great planet, alive 
with us, our thoughts and loves and sympathies 
should just cluster a half-dozen here and a 
half-dozen there, and count all the "world," 
so far as we care, on our fingers. 

I suppose we are reading the same tele- 
graphic news, every day, and hearing the same 
topics talked, and the wives are playing the 
identical pieces on the pretty-much-identical 
pianos (only ours is out of tune at present) and 
so on. Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

TO H. H. 
Berkeley, Cal., February 13, 1880. 
Dear Henry, — Yours just rec'd. Thank 
you for the information for my inquiring stu- 
dent, about the book-man. I knew about the 
Social Science Associations, but my point was 
tljat they don't go to the bottom difficulty : viz., 
what end are we after ? And secondly, is it the 
end we had better be after. My notion is that 



XXX Introduction 

Spencer is the only man that has begun to 
answer that question — namely in the Data — 
and in previous hints which he that did n't 
run too fast might read, and that the Associa- 
tions have been puttering about Contagious 
Diseases, Drainage, Prison Reform, and other 
such excellent matters to work at, but the per- 
fection of which would leave us very little 
better off than at present. The best thing you 
can do with such people as we have now is to 
let the contagious diseases thin 'em out a little, 
perhaps. 

As to your thought that I have scattered, 
and ought to make myself " favorably known." 
My dear fellow, I like your caring for me 
enough to say this and wish this, but — if you 
knew about my life of late years and my ideas 
of life, you would see. I am not and have n't 
been trying to make myself favorably known. 
The devil take any one that is trying for it. I 
have been working to educate, in some high 
sense, successive classes of young people ; and 
meanwhile to know more about education, and 
especially literature as a means of it, and about 
education in its relation to society and life. I 
am contented to die unknown, if I can arrive 
at the truth about certain great matters, and 
can put others in the way thereof. If there is 
anything which utterly disgusts me and makes 



Introduction xxxi 

me howl aloud and swear, it is these infernal 
fools who are fighting to get their names 
abroad, and care for no other work. That a 
man like Spencer should be well known is a 
matter of course and all right ; but he has not 
cared for that. Let a man work his work in 
peace, and the devil take his name — the less 
likely to get anything more of him than that. 
But I am ever yours. 

TO M. w. s. 

Ambleside, Westmoreland, 
September, 1881. 

This violet is a descendant of the one 
Wordsworth is always writing about. At least 
I picked it to-day on the side of the path where 
he must have walked many times, between his 
house and Stock Ghyll Force. It is a beauti- 
ful region, this of the English Lakes ; but one 
does n't see, after all, why poetry should not 
be thought and felt and written as well at 
Niles or Berkeley as in Westmoreland. The 
Alps and this region you must see some day. 

In haste, with regards to you all, from both 
of us. Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 



xxxii Introduction 

TO THE SAME 

CuYA. Falls, 
Tuesday morning, May 15, 1883. 

Your so large a letter with your own hand 
was rec'd last evening, in the midst of some 
petty personal bothers and obscure mental 
generalizations not favorable to the scheme of 
things : so that it served admirably the pur- 
pose of foreign travel and new scenes to the 
invalid, and I went to bed much refreshed and 
lightened up. 

All our ordinary bothers only need an out- 
side point of view to let the sawdust out of 
them (rapid change of figure : Shaksperian), 
and to get into another person's world gives us 
a big parallax for proper estimates of our own 
orbits. What fairy mythology is there, of a 
man who shifts from one life to another and 
back all the time : so when I read your letters 
I am a Californian out and out — or in and in. 

By the way, I sent the volume — (it needs 
a name : what shall I call it ? Little Piecrusty) 
to Matthew Arnold, and he was so gracious as 
to send me a letter expressing his pleasure at 
some things in it — briefly — and, by the way, 
his much agreement with my H. Spencer arti- 
cle in the "Atlantic." They tell me, by the way 
to the third power, that Youmans has made a 



Introduction xxxiii 

furious assault on it — but I shan't look at it 
till I want to write again on the subject. . . . 

TO A PUPIL 

June 6, 1881. 

Dear Lucy, — Your question of 26th May 
was too good a one to leave so long unan- 
swered. It was not left as being too hard to 
answer, but I have been very busy, and really 
could not find time to settle myself to say any- 
thing on so important a question till to-night, 
and now it must be a brief note. The real 
value of " being well read " seems to me to be 
in the wider and truer life it gives us. By 
" wider " I mean that our thoughts and feel- 
ings and purposes are more complex and more 
consonant with the complexity and manifold- 
ness of the universe we live in : the microcosm 
gets a little — even if a very little — nearer in 
quality and quantity to the macrocosm. The 
crystal leads such a narrow life — just along 
one little line — a single law of facet and 
angle : the plant a little wider : the fish a little 
wider : and the different sorts of people widen- 
ing and widening out in their inner activities 
— and much according to their reading (since 
living human contact is not possible, except 
with the few relatives and neighbors). 

And by truer life, I mean truer to nature : 



xxxiv Introduction 

more as we were meant to be : the inner rela- 
tions, between ideas, corresponding closer to 
the outer relations — or " real " relations — 
between things. These real thing-relations are 
in fact very complex and vastly inclusive : so 
must the thoughts and feelings be, if " true," 
or truly correspondent or mirror-like to them. 

I don't see that culture (unless you spell it 
wrong) needs — or tends at all — to cut one 
off from human warmth. Are not some of the 
" best read " people you know or hear of, some 
of the broadest-hearted also ? The very es- 
sence of culture is shaking off the nightmare 
of self-consciousness and self-absorption and 
attaining a sort of Christian Nirvana — lost in 
the great whole of humanity : thinking of 
others, caring for others, admiring and loving 
others. 

I should like to have you write me more 
fully about it some time. 

Yours sincerely. 

TO E. B. 

February 2, 1883. 
Dear Miss B. — It 's a bad time to take up 
trees in the winter ; ground is frozen ; roots 
can't go down. This is a parable. If it were 
summer here, no doubt I should be taking 
long walks and going fishing, and mooning 



Introduction xxxv 

about, nights — and keeping my old environ- 
ment out of my head as thoroughly as pos- 
sible. But it 's winter — the dead vast and 
middle of it (as Howell quotes of the summer) 

— and my roots are all in the air as yet, and 
I feel extremely queer. We are supposed to 
have got settled. I have established a writ- 
ing-table with the birds contiguous (as near a 
window as I dare put 'em for fear of freezing 
their noses off : you remember how the cold air 
pierces in between the sashes of a window like 
a long thin knife ?). Mr. Kellogg's " Berkeley 
bucket " of last Xmas stands on the table with 
some rather timid-looking greenhouse pinks 
and geraniums in it. They manage to have 
some green leaves and posies under a glass — 
but what looking gardens ! They were spaded 
in the fall, so that when not mercifully veiled 
with snow they look all lumpy mud, frozen. 
Gracious ! what a looking world. 

I am supposed to be entered on a mad 
career of literary work. Have so far only 
written some very mild verses — suitable for 
nursery use in some amiable but weak-minded 
family. But then I 've been skating twice ! 
Think of that — real ice, too. You can make 
Mr. Metcalf feel bad about that, if you tell him 

— and make him think he 'd like to be here ; 
but he would n't. 



xxxvi Introduction 

It's a curious illusion of yours out there, 
that you can go out and pick flowers and hear 
leaves rustle and see grass grow and feel 
thorough-going sunshine. You can't, you 
know, 'cause it 's winter everywhere : snow 
and ice, or frozen slush and mud — it must be. 
I used to have that same hallucination when I 
was out there. Queer. Effect of the climate, 
I s'pose. 

Did you like the sea ? Then you would like 
Russell's " Lady Maud " (and his other books). 
Wonderful descriptions of the sea and life in 
ships and storms. 

You are going to write, you know. 

With love to you all, yours faithfully. 

E. R. Sill. 



TO 



[Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio,] 
March 29, 1883. 

My Dear Ed, — You are getting on toward 
the close of the Second Act — the college 
days : and no doubt the management of the 
Third Act begins to occupy your mind a good 
deal — and perhaps to vex it a little. What 
to do with one's life gets to be a large question 
toward the close of Senior Year. In my own, 
I was saved a part of the question, for my 
health was frail and threatened me a little, so 



Introduction xxxvii 

that the hnmediate duty was plain enough — to 
cut and run ; which I did, on a long sea voy- 
age ; it was a toss-up which way it should be, 
among all the oceans and continents, but it 
happened to be to California. I had pretty 
much determined that I would try to get a 
better aim than the common ones. " I could 
not hide that some had striven,'^ at least, what- 
ever they had " attained." Egoism, pure and 
simple, had somehow always struck me — theo- 
retically — as mighty paltry for a grown-up 
man ; a kind of permanent <r/^//^-condition. 
And I cast about for some way of combining 
service with bread and butter. The ministry, 
or teaching, I finally settled it must be for me. 
It was a little narrow, and conceited, too, to 
confine the choice to those two. I can see 
now that there are lots of ways to serve — 
more even than ways to get bread and butter. 

A sort of desperate self-distrust made me 
choose teaching, of the two ; but before I got 
at it, this same morbid notion made me skulk 
from that. I said, in a kind of ridiculous 
nightmare of diffidence, " I never can do it — 
never." So I clerked in a P. O. and then in a 
bank. At last I went to a Theological Semi- 
nary (in Cambridge, because there you did not 
have to subscribe to a creed, definitely, on the 
start) and thought I would try the preliminary 



xxxviii Introduction 

steps, anyway, toward the ministry. But here 
I finally found I did not believe in the things 
to be preached, as churches went, as historical 
facts. So I desperately tried teaching. 

I set my teeth together, took a saddle-horse, 
rode about the country and hunted up a locality 
I liked the looks of, with a clean little school- 
house and wholesome looking farm people 
about it, and taught that country school. I 
found there was no difficulty in doijtg it, after 
a fashion at least ; so I kept on, — up to the 
date of my leaving you in California. Toward 
the last I kept on, not so much because I still 
felt that this was the only altruistic-egoistic 
occupation for a man — my view had broad- 
ened from that — but rather because it was 
the thing I had learned to do. One can't 
switch off after a certain age. Besides, it was 
one thing, certainly, among others, worth doing. 
There are few men that find after forty that 
there are more things than one that they know 
how to do even decently well. 

One thing is clear : a year or two of teach- 
ing is good honest work for any one — an ad- 
vantage to others, and to self (for others in the 
future), as well. But if you knew you should 
then go into medicine, I think I should not 
wait but go into it at once. You may think 
medicine ministers only to the body — but, 



Introduction xxxix 

I. the body is a necessary condition of higher 
things, and 2. a good physician finds himself 
in one of the most influential positions in the 
community for good. Nor need his work be 
confined to his lancet and pill-boxes (though 
there 's a nobleness about those, when you 
think of the relations of mind and body), but 
there is an endless range of studies, and per- 
haps of writing, possible to such a profession. 

One thing we must try to realize. Our in- 
dividual drop of force is only one in a great 
sea. Perhaps, even if we saw just what par- 
ticular piece of work the world most needed, 
we should not be the man for it. I see a num- 
ber of things that need tremendously to be 
done ; but /can't do them. I was n't properly 
endowed, or I had n't, and could n't have got, 
the training for it. Meantime I do what my 
hand finds to do and try not to fret. For ex- 
ample, I have just effected the organization 
of a Library Association in this little manufac- 
turing town — which very likely will prove to 
be the most valuable piece of work I have ever 
done, or shall ever do. May be one ought to 
say — for who knows tendencies and subtle- 
ties of outcome — the least harmful piece of 
work. Anyway, the thing is not to spoil too 
much time and brains trying to be sure of the 
absolutely best work — but to use all reason- 



xl Introduction 

able effort to see, and then — even if in vexa- 
tious doubt — to strike into the most probably 
sensible course, and work like a locomotive. 
One can at least fix his course for a year 
ahead, and agree with his conscience to let 
him alone to work at that for the year. And 
so year by year, if no other way is possible to 
one's temperament, one can get through a fine 
stent of work in a lifetime. 

Faithfully yours, E. R. Sill. 

TO E. B. 

Windsor, June i6, 1883. 
My dear Neighbor, — I have been making 
a pilgrimage to Ellington to-day. I wish you 
could have gone with me. It has been, to be- 
gin with, a perfect June day, and you remember 
the look of it in these regions : the blue sky 
with white dapples in it, the lustrous leaves 
not yet long enough out of their sheaths to 
have lost their tender new green, the fields full 
of daisies (too full, the honest farmer would 
say — but not too full for the passing vaga- 
bones to enjoy), the laurel glimmering in the 
woods (remember it ?), the roads as they run 
through thickety places full of the smell of 
wild grape blossoms (remember 'em ?), the rye 
soft and wavy (nothing but rye in the sandy 
plains betwixt here and Ellington), or a little 
tobacco and spindly corn — plain living and 



Introduction xli 

high thinking must be the rule out around 
there among the farmers. The soil looks bet- 
ter in Vernon. 

Ellington is beautiful. It might be just a 
little qitiet in the winter, for gay people like 
you, but at this season it is great. There 's a 
glorious silence there. I saw a man, and a boy 
with a toy wagon, and another man, all on the 
street at once. But they went into dooryards 
and were seen no more. What a dignity and 
placid reserve about the place ! The houses 
all look like the country-seats of persons of 
great respectability who had retired on a com- 
petence — and retired a great ways while they 
were about it. And what big houses they used 
to build. Used to, I say, because there is n't 
a house over there that looks less than a thou- 
sand years old : not that they look old as 
seeming worn or rickety at all, but old as being 
very stately and wise and imperturbable. I am 
struck, all about here in Connecticut, with the 
well-kept-up look of the houses. Paint must 
be cheap — no, 't is n't that. Paint is probably 
pretty dear ; but they believe in keeping every- 
thing slicked up. Yet there are a few oldest of 
the old houses that came out of the ark I know. 
One on the road to Rockville. right hand side, 
may be half a mile or less from your house, 
never painted, all collapsed, door frames and 
window frames slumped down on one side, 



xlii Introduction 

everything leaning, ready to tumble in a heap 
the next high wind. 

I gazed west at the green and east at the 
hills, and south at the fields and Rockville in 
the distance, and reflected that you had done 
the same on similar days a great many times. 
Oh, I had quite a sentimental day of it, I assure 
you. I quite entered into your point of view, 
and it was almost as if you were there — if you 
only had been aware of it. 

Yours, E. R. Sill. 

TO C. T. H. P. 

July 1 6, 1883. 
I am just back from a summering in the an- 
cient and somnolent pastures of New England : 
some weeks at my old home, Windsor, in the 
Connecticut River valley — you remember how 
green and peaceful that region is, cornfields and 
hayfields, and elm-shaded streets and maple- 
shaded houses (with green blinds, mostly shut 
tight), and patches of their pretty woods — the 
trees only shrubs to a Californian eye, but 
ever so fresh and graceful, and lustrous with 
rain or dew : a week in the White Mts. — they, 
too, dwarf varieties, but capable of good color- 
ing and various picturesque " effects ; " and a 
few days on the Maine seashore. 

Yours, E. R. Sill. 



Introduction xliii 

January 4, 1884. 
You would like this winter weather. Re- 
member how the snow creaks under foot, in 
zero-cold ? and the good smell of frozen oxygen, 
and how your mustache freezes up, and how 
the fields of blue-white snow stretch away every- 
where, and Pan retires all his passions and 
emotions from the landscape, and leaves only 
pure intellect — cold and white and clear ? — 
One ought to have, tho', a house about seven 
miles square, full of open fires and open friends 
— both kept well replenished 2ir\d poked up. I 
should like to see some of these winter scenes, 
and some of these sunsets, out of yotcr west 
window. I wish you a very happy rest-of-the- 
year. Write when you can. 

Yours, E. R. Sill. 

TO M. K. 

August II, 1883. 

Dear Mr. K. — Yours of 4th was received 

yesterday, and papers containing the same sad 
news of Mr. Crane's death. I had heard that 
he was seriously ill, but afterward that he was 
supposed to be out of danger ; so that I was 
greatly surprised when the news came. Some- 
how he seemed a man that would not die : 
there seemed such an amount of quick, active 
life in him. I always thought of him as so 



xliv Introduction 

thoroughly alive. He always came to my re- 
collection as he looked when speaking in the 
Club — perfectly quiet in manner and tone, 
but every fibre of his brain evidently electric. 
I had written him a letter a few weeks ago, 
from an impulse to tell him how well I appre- 
ciated him and liked him. I am specially glad 
now that I did. Another evidence that a man 
had better always follow his first impulse. 
And it was kept clear and reinforced all the 
time by an integrity of intellect that made him 
look first of all to see what was true. Other 
men were after the right sound, or the prudent 
word, or the polite one, or the amiable one, or 
one that would stop a gap when ideas were 
wanting. He was after the exact and unadul- 
terated fact. And my brain was actually in 
love with his, ever since I first knew him. 

Personally he never in the least warmed 
toward me ; but I never in the least looked 
for that. One of the things that made me like 
him was that I seemed to see that he divined 
my own limitations, and weighed me pretty ac- 
curately. I admired him the more from the 
fact that he did not at all admire me,^ and I 
liked him the more from the fact that his intel- 
lectual honesty seemed to do justice to mine 

1 In fact, Mr. Crane cherished a peculiar admiration 
for Professor Sill. 



Introduction xlv 

— a thing which from boyhood has been a 
permanent craving with me. Well, I didn't 
expect him to die, and I am mighty sorry to 
lose him from this world. Yes, he is one of 
the men that help one to believe in the immor- 
tality of the soul. I think Crane — the real 
man — must be, somewhere, to-day, just as 
truly as he was a month ago. 

I am very much indebted to you for your 
letters. I don't at all mean to have life all slip 
away without seeing you again in the flesh. 
Faithfully yours, E. R. Sill. 

TO M. W. S. 
CuY. Falls, October 25, 1883. 
Did you know Kant wrote some poems when 
young (I don't know but later than young)? 
This is one : — 

" Was auf das Leben folgt, deckt tief e Finsterniss ; 
Was uns zu thun gebuhrt, des [sic] sind wir nur gewiss, 
Dem kann, wie Lilienthal, kein Tod die Hoffnung 

rauben, 
Der glaubt, urn recht zu thun, recht thut, um froh zu 
glauben." 

Have you read Daudet's bit of reminiscence 
of Turgenieff in "Century"? And the por- 
trait ! 

If only men did n't die just as they are get- 
ting ripe and great ! Death is fi't a gentle 



xlvi Introduction 

angel. The old view is the true view. No 
flowers can hide the skull. It is not only 
awful — it is horrible that people should die. 
No — don't print that poem of mine, "The 
Morning Thought " — not now. 

Do you happen to know whatever has be- 
come of C ? I have an old interest in 

him, and wish he might be what he was meant 
to be by his over-sanguine maker. 

Somehow I pity everybody lately. Do you 
know anybody one could — envy, — say — for 
a change ? 

Silence is not golden, but leaden — or earthen. 
Argal, write ! 

Yrs. E. R. S. 

TO E. B. 

[Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio,] 
May 12, 1884. 
Dear Miss B. — You recollect old Geo. 
Herbert after a season of dumps congratu- 
lates himself that once more he doth "relish 
versing" — So there are faint symptoms that 
now that the apple-trees are at last in blossom 
I may relish writing to my friends. Alack, I 
have not so many to whom I ever write, or 
from whom I am ever written to (I no longer 
teach the English language) that I need wait 
so long to write at least a brief scratch. Yet 



Introduction xlvii 

you know one will delay a long time, thinking 
that by and by he will ho. just in the mood and 
tense. The truth is I desire to hear from you. 
Otherwise there are hardly enough apple-trees 
out to move me, even this May morning. Is 
it any wonder people talk about the weather ? 
For what is there that plays the deuce with us 
like that. I confess I am completely under it 
half the time — and more than half under, the 
balance. Rejoice, O young woman, in thy 
Berkeley ! Why don't you come on and visit 
Connecticut ? and stop here on the way ! It 's 
very pretty now, I assure you. Treacherous, 
a little, but full of greenery and blossoms. In 
New England no doubt it is still prettier. In 
the past week the sky — even in Ohio — has 
been summer blue. You remember what that 
is, between big round pearly white clouds ? 
But for six months previously it was a dome 
of lead, or dirty white. Now and then, of a 
rare day, the color of a black and blue spot 
on a boy's knee. Once or twice in a month, 
when the sun tried to shine, the hue of very 
poor skim milk. The gods economizing, no 
doubt, and taking that mild drink in place of 
nectar — or slopping it around feeding their 
cats — or the Skye terriers. If I recollect 
aright you have midsummer in May, there. 
Hot forenoons and bootiful fog in the evening ? 



xlviii Introduction 

I would like to help you dig your garden. We 
have now apple, pear, and cherry trees in blos- 
som, yellow currant, white and purple lilacs, 
flowering cherry: pansies, tulips, lily of the 
valley, and genuine solid green turf sprinkled 
with gold buttons of dandelions. The air is 
full of fragrance. The robins, bluebirds, wrens, 
and orioles are building wonderful nests all 
over the place. Three red and black game 
bantams are parading on the lawn, and seven 
baby bantams about as big as the end of my 
thumb are skittering around under the laylocs. 
Are you all well, and good as ever ? My 
love to all of both your houses. Don't wait 
long before writing. 

Yours, E. R. Sill. 

TO M. w. s. 

CuY. Falls, August i6, 1884. 
Saturday. 

I sent you yesterday a pretty long screed 
about Emerson, telling you to use the whole of 
it, or part of it, or very little of it, or none at 
all of it. I should be equally well suited either 
way. 

I don't think other people feel the way I do 
about that. When a thing is written they have 
a trembling hope, at least, that it is good, and 
anyhow wish to have it used. But you should 



Introduction xlix 

see the equanimity with which I write thing 
after thing — both prose and verse — and stow 
them away, never sending them anywhere, or 
thinking of printing any book of them, at pre- 
sent, if ever. Sometimes I do think I will leave 
a lot of stuff for some one to pick out a post- 
humous volume from — but more and more my 
sober judgment tells me that other people have 
seen or will see all that I have, and will state 
it better. 

It is very strange, though, the difference be- 
tween my positiveness of judgment as to other 
people's writings, and my lack of any power to 
judge at all of my own. It would perhaps be 
an interesting psychological study for you if I 
could make you see my mind about this. I 
judge swiftly and positively of literature in 
general. For one thing, the consciousness has 
more and more been ground into me that my 
whole point of view is hopelessly different from 
that of people in general — I mean educated 
and intelligent people. Nor do I have the 
compensation of feeling this difference a supe- 
riority. I should have made an excellent citi- 
zen of some other planet, may be, and they got 
me on the wrong one. 

I don't feel the least fitness for a writer. 
When anything of mine is to be printed I have 
often a horrid sense — now the fingers of the 



1 Introduction 

whole universe will be pointing at this fellow 
as an example of a wretch that has mistaken 
his vocation. When it is once printed, I feel in- 
stantly relieved, in the knowledge that nobody 
reads things — after all — or cares whether 
they are good or not. The fingers I perceive 
to be all pointing at more conspicuous objects, 
or being harmlessly sucked in the mouth : so 
I don't care a bit — till the next thing is about 
to be printed. The " Century" has had some 
time a sonnet of mine. You would not believe 
how I have actually shuddered internally each 
month with fear that now I am going to be 
stuck up on a post without a rag on me at last, 
and my nightmare was to come true. 

I don't believe I ever shall write a thing 
that is really good. Yet, with it all, I have 
unbounded conceit of my o^n judg7?ient zbowt 
the things I feel I see clearly. 

Queer, queer fellows we all are. Must be 
fun for the bigger fellows that hide in the 
clouds and watch us. 

Yours — and I 'd like to hear how you are. 

E. R. S. 



TO 



C. F., November i. Monday. 
The trouble about signing one's name to 
poems is, that stupid people (and we are all 



Introduction li 

pretty stupid sometimes) persist in thinking 
every word literally autobiographical. I have 
had enough annoyance from that to sicken any 
one of ever writing verse again, or anything 
else but arithmetics and geographies. Even 
then somebody would hate you for your view of 
the Indian Ocean, or fear the worst about your 
character because of your treatment of the 
Least Common Multiple. People are getting 
to write anon3^mously now and then. (You 
did n't write " The Breadwinners," did you ? 
Perhaps the Janitor at the University did — 
or Bacon the printer, or Hy. Ward Beecher.) 

As to French poetry, I know there 's another 
side. I believe as I used to, about the mass 
of French waiters. It 's only here and there a 
Geo. Sand, or a delicate poet. As to German 
— Heine was a Jew of the Jews. You might 
as well instance Job as a German. A friend 
of mine calls certain graceful verse "unsub- 
stantial." It 's true much of the French is so. 

Your test is the best one : what sticks in the 
mind. Or as some one puts it, as a test of 
great writers, whose work has most entered 
into the world's intellectual life "i 

Yours, E. R. S. 



lii Introduction 

TO H. H. 

CuY. Falls, January 23, 1885. 

Dear Henry, — Yours of 21st rec'd. 
Thank you for answer to my question. 

As to whether I would accept a certain offer, 
if made : — there would be two very serious 
obstacles. First, that I am not the man, in 
several important respects, to fill the place 
well. I know the sort of man it requires, and 
that I am not the one. Second, that I could 
not leave here at present. My plain duty is 
right here, and it would never do to run away 
from it. 

Very good of you to think of such a thing. 
But a man for that place should be picked out 
by his enemies, not his friends. There is a 
great opportunity there. 

As ever, yours. 

TO THE SAME 

Neither ought I to give you the impression 
that the religious question is my only reason 
for not encouraging any effort to have me 
selected at Yale for that vacant chair. There 
are reasons arising from my own personal dis- 
abilities, into which it is no use to go. . . . 
Again, I should be sorry if I had made you 
suppose that I am one of those bull-headed 



Introduction liii 

enthusiasts who wishes to foist his own hobby 
into every company. I remember one of my 
students, since graduating, giving me warm 
praise for the delicacy I had seemed to show 
in respecting the religious points of view of 
my classes, always. 

But, on the other hand, you cannot, of course, 
realize (till you have come to teach the subject) 
how all our best literature in this century — 
and a good deal of it in the last century — 
dips continually into this underlying stream of 
philosophical thought, and ethical feeling. " In 
Memoriam," for example, is one of the poems 
I read with my Senior classes. You may dis- 
cuss its rhythms, its epithets, its metaphors, 
its felicities and infelicities as Art, — you are 
still on the surface of it. The fact is that a 
thinking man put a good lot of his views of 
things in general into it — and those views and 
his feelings about them are precisely the " lit- 
erature " there is in the thing. And the study 
of it, as literature, should transfer these views 
and feelings straight and clear to the brain of 
the student. So of " Middlemarch," or " Ro- 
mola," or Hume's Essays, or "Faust," or 
" Manfred," or Kenan's " Souvenirs de I'en- 
fance." 

The more you think of it the more you will 
come to see that the moment you drive the 



liv Introduction 

study of literature away from the virile thought 
of modern men and women, you drive it into 
the puerilities of word-study, and mousing 
about " end-stopt lines " and all that. 

I hope we old friends, if we must get fewer, 
will at least come to understand each other 
better and better. That is one pleasure that 
remains after youth, and indeed increases the 
longer we live, I believe. 

Most truly yours. 

TO C. T. H. P. 

December 21, 1885, 
That peculiarity of which I spoke to you — 
of my forgetting what I have written on a given 
occasion — will play me some bad trick some 
day, I expect. It has been my case, always, 
that a thing once written is dismissed from my 
mind with a kind of cold dislike. I never 
liked my children, so to speak. It has hap- 
pened several times that I have been accused 
of writing a certain verse or line, and I have 
denied it — and found I had after all, and 
printed it, too. It comes, I should n't wonder 
if, from a kind of self-love, or egotistic pride — 
mingled with 3. perception of high things beyond 
the power to accomplish them. I hate every 
bit of verse I write, as soon as it is printed, 
and would gladly never see it again. I do not 



Introduction Iv 

forget other people's writings in this way — 
tho' I have by no means a good memory for lit- 
erature in general ; but it 's not so disgrace- 
fully bad a one. (I expect to get caught in 
some unconscious " plagiarism " some day ; for 
I do sometimes read things rapidly and forget 
them. I only wonder that writers are not 
caught every day of their lives that way.) I 
have strong impulses to write, as in the case 
of letters ; but immediately a thing is mailed, 
I fall to thinking — " What the devil was the 
use of writing that ! " and then sometimes to 
thinking — " I wonder if I have n't said all that 
once or twice before ! " 

When a man sits down in the same old 
chair, and summons before his mind's eye the 
same old set of faces and circumstances and 
recollections, why does he Jiot write, to any 
friend, the same old letter over and over again ? 
I wonder if we all do ! 

Yours, E. R. Sill. 

TO THE SAME 

January i, 1887. 
I don't like the years to go so. I was not 
half done with '86. 

I read this in Turgenieff' s " Raufbold " last 
night : — 

" Er hatte viel gelesen ; und so bildete er 



Ivi Introduction 

sich ein er besitze Erfahrung und Klugheit ; er 
legte nicht den leisesten Zweifel dass alle seine 
Voraussetzungen richtig seien ; er ahnte nicht 
dass das Leben unendlich mannigfaltig ist, und 
sich niemals wiederholt." 

So, to live is more than to read, and one 
might know all things and miss of everything. 
And so, if life is endlessly manifold, we may 
hope for good and great things, here or here- 
after. 



OUR TAME HUMMINGBIRDS 



HY is it that everybody is interested 
in birds ? You may sit on a fence in 
the fields, or on a fallen tree-trunk in 
the forest, and find all nature " weary, stale, 
flat, and unprofitable," till some bit of a bird 
lights near you. Instantly the scene is ani- 
mated. You watch him plume his wing, or flit 
about with one bright eye on you, and you see 
nothing else as long as he is there. Is it one 
chief element of the interest he excites that you 
never know what he will do next ? 

It is a curious fact, too, that our interest in 
the feathered creatures is in inverse ratio to 
their size. Except, perhaps, in the case of the 
peacock, which belongs to the guild of aes- 
thetes, and enjoys an ephemeral eminence on 
that account, we do not seem to care much for 
big birds. Nobody keeps a pet ostrich. The 
American eagle is not found in a tame state 
except in oratory. Even the dodo is only in- 
teresting because extinct. Nobody is so weak 



2 Nature 

as to feel flattered by the confidence of a goose 
or a parrot. But it really seems an attention 
when a chipping-bird lingers near us. And 
we are very proud that the chattering wren 
slips in and out of its box in our presence, 
just as if we were a mere tree. 

Somebody explains our fondness for birds 
by their being so perpetually happy ; and in- 
stances our interest in seeing children play 
about us as a case of the same kind. But I 
think there must be some deeper cause. There 
are more subtile sympathies between us than 
through happiness merely. The birds, for that 
matter, are fiot always happy. Some of them 
sing a minor strain. We cannot understand 
the words always (my wife says the catbirds 
sing in French), but the tone certainly some- 
times has tears in it: unshed tears, — for I 
think the birds never cry, — but the sadder 
for that. Of course I understand that the 
sadness is often only of our bringing; and 
that we find the song sad just because it is so 
glad. As Burns hath it : — 

" Thou 'It break my heart, thou bonnie bird, 
That sings upon the bough ; 
Thou minds me o' the happy days 
When my fause luve was true. 

" Thou 'It break my heart, thou bonnie bird, 
That sings beside thy mate ; 



Our Tame Humminghirds 3 

For sae I sat, and sae I sang, 
An' wist na o' my fate." 

But sometimes the sadness is in the song it- 
self. I have heard genuine threnodies when 
the bird's mate has been slain. Our interest 
in children comes from the fact, rather, that 
we ourselves were children, not long ago. And 
I incline to think it may be so with regard to 
the birds. It is possible that after coming up 
the line of evolution through fishes, reptiles, 
and birds, we skipped the lower mammals, and 
came at once to Man. The birds, in this way, 
are a reminiscence to us. That is where we 
were, last. jPars quorum fui, we feel, as we 
watch their social and domestic life. Does not 
every child try to fly ? And do we not depict 
the angels with feathered wings — as the little 
girl said, " with fedders like a hen " ? Not 
only does the play of birds seem very human 
and childlike to us, — their chasing each other 
about for pure fun, their frolicking at the bath- 
tub instead of settling down to the serious busi- 
ness of the hour, their sham fights, their gym- 
nastics, their playing tag till dark, their sense 
of humor as shown in various pranks, — like 
the blue jay's plugging pebbles into the acorn- 
holes " to fool the woodpeckers " (as a genial 
scientist suggests) ; but their habits of work, 
too, are much more like our human lot than 



4 Nature 

those of other animals. There is no house- 
builder and housekeeper, short of the genus 
homo^ like a bird. And no mothers do so much 
for their babies, in feeding them or fighting 
for them, as human and bird mothers do. In 
no other walk of life, either, will the male par- 
ent take the place of the female, when she is 
gone, with such solicitude and perfect care for 
the offspring. Indeed, the human male only 
humbly imitates the feathered one here, and at 
a considerable distance. 

The hummingbird, among all the feathered 
creation, seems a creature by itself. One may 
easily live a lifetime, even in our latitude, 
where they are common enough, nesting and 
rearing their young here, and staying with us 
the whole summer, without ever making close 
acquaintance with this least of birds. I even 
saw, not long ago, and in a scientific journal of 
repute, the assertion made confidently — as if 
it were one of the facts that every schoolboy 
knows — that the hummingbird has no song! 
One might as well assert that the canary or the 
nightingale has no song — or the hen. Brilliant 
and conspicuous as are its colors, and close as 
it constantly comes to human beings in sharing 
with them their intimacies with the garden 
flowers, its restlessness and swiftness of flight 
enable it to elude all ordinary observation. Its 



Our Tame Hummingbirds 5 

wings, indeed, might be said to be actually- 
invisible. They vanish from sight and fade 
into thin air, except when the bird is at rest ; 
and it is almost never at rest. And who ever 
saw the feet of a hummingbird ? It does not 
seem an earth inhabitant at all. It flashes 
down upon a flower-bed, like a mere reflection 
of light thrown by a restless mirror, and 
flashes off again. It is a sprite, an elfin of 
the elements. Few persons ever find its nest 
or see its eggs or young. People do not see it 
at work or at play, or engaged in any of the 
ordinary business of human or bird life. It 
dashes on the scene and away, and has done 
nothing but dip a rapid bill into a flower-cup 
or two. It is the shooting star of the garden 
firmament. It has no known orbits, and the 
most conspicuous thing it ever does is to vanish. 
Accordingly, it was not so much because of 
its beauty, in its burnished mail of golden green, 
or its elfin symmetry and loveliness of tiny out- 
lines, as because of this spritelike, unapproach- 
able character, that I always had longed to 
have a tame hummingbird. This coy, evanes- 
cent, ethereal sprite, owning no kinship with 
ordinary things of earth, — this glint of ani- 
mated sunshine, this star gleam, this fleck of 
flying rainbow, — I wanted to call him mine; 
to have personal relations with him ; to wink 



6 Nature 

at him and have him respond as one who per- 
ceives the point ; to have him perch on my 
finger, and perhaps — after a long time and 
after infinite proofs of reHable friendship on 
my part — to have him permit me very hghtly 
to stroke those wonderful metallic feathers 
adown his little iridescent breast. 

Moreover, they are so small. I wanted to 
possess — to have and to hold — this least bit 
of a wee speck of an intellectual being, — the 
tiniest mite of a body in which soul seems able 
to lodge securely, — real soul, by the test of 
being capable of mutual communication with 
the soul of man. I never wanted one to cage 
it up, as people sometimes cruelly do, and see 
it beat its poor little life out against the bars ; 
but to take one young, and tame it, and make 
friends with it as one does with a horse, or a 
dog, — that would be different. 

So when, one June morning, I discovered 
the nest on the limb of the old apple-tree by 
the greenhouse, and had got the step-ladder 
and clambered up quietly, and set eyes on the 
two little white sugar-plums of eggs, I instantly 
perceived the possibilities they contained, and 
nodded knowingly to them, as who should say, 
" At last I have you ! " 

The nest was about as large externally as 
the half of an average-sized hen's egg — a little 



Our Tame Hummingbirds y 

soft, cottony cup of downy texture, glued to- 
gether with what the books declare to be the 
bird's saliva, but what seems more like cob- 
web, gathered and used while fresh and gluti- 
nous. All the outside was shingled over with 
irregular bits of lichen. It was built on a 
smooth apple-tree bough less than half an inch 
in diameter ; the bottom set firmly down over 
the bough, and the line of lichen-bits running 
all the way round underneath, apparently with 
the mere purpose of making it all seem a part 
of the tree. The result was, at any rate, that 
the nest looked like only a little gray knot, 
which no one in the world would have noticed, 
unless specially searching for it. In the small, 
soft interior lay the two eggs, each about 
three eighths of an inch long, cylindrical, with 
rounded ends, instead of ovate like ordinary 
eggs, and quite like two little clumsy mites 
of sugar-plums. The bough on which rested 
this tiny flower-cup of a nest hung some ten 
feet from the ground, and directly over a fre- 
quented garden walk : a singular choice of po- 
sition, but the builder no doubt trusted to the 
invisibility both of itself and its habitation. 
Round the trunk of the old apple-tree was a 
rustic bench, where my wife and I passed many 
an hour, w^atching our fairy and her hchen- 
thatched home. For the first day or two of 



8 Nature 

our observation, the little body was rather im- 
patient of our close proximity ; and we used 
to drop our voices to a whisper, and keep our 
posture of the moment unmoved, however in- 
convenient this might happen to be, when we 
heard the low humming that announced her 
approach. She would fly nearly to the nest, 
then suddenly stop and hold herself poised in 
the air, putting her head on one side, and fix- 
ing one bright little black eye on us ; then she 
would dart down and inspect us more closely. 
Apparently detecting by some subtle sixth 
sense our friendly intentions, she would flash 
back to the nest, pause an instant above it, 
then drop suddenly and softly in, leaving no- 
thing visible but a bit of tail slanted up at one 
side, and the rigid little bill, elevated at an 
angle of forty-five degrees, at the other. 

Such inefficient setting one never saw. The 
longest time I ever knew her to stay on the 
nest, in the daytime, was fifteen minutes. 
Oftener it was but three or four. After such 
a terribly wearisome and monotonous stay as 
this, she would be off like a bullet across the 
garden, or in through the upper windows of 
the greenhouse. In good bright weather she 
would be away from five to fifteen minutes, 
leaving the sunshine to brood her twin trea- 
sures. 



Our Tame Hummingbirds 9 

For my own part, I gave up all hopes that 
such shiftless conduct would ever hatch out 
anything. It looked like the merest playing 
at sitting, as children play with dolls and doll 
cradles. All day long she would be off and 
on in this way, sometimes remaining but thirty 
seconds on the nest. Of course nothing could 
ever come of it. But my wife had more confi- 
dence in the maternal instinct, even the minute 
thimbleful of it for which there was room in 
that small bird-breast. Depend upon it (she 
would say), the little creature knows what she 
is about. 

In fact, she did. One morning, on making 
my regular excursion to the top of the step- 
ladder, I saw that a miraculous transformation 
had taken place ; a metamorphosis as wonder- 
ful as any that Ovid sang. The white sugar- 
plums had turned into two ugly little dark 
bugs, soft, sparsely thatched with black fuzz, 
eyes unopened, tailless, and with no other sign 
of a bill than a horny point on that end which 
one was, from this circumstance, led to sup- 
pose the head. Moreover, the minute black 
monsters were palpitating, in a lumpy sort of 
way, with life. 

The mother-bird now became a little less in- 
efficient. Indeed, she showed signs of excite- 
ment; darting about, perhaps, a thought more 



10 Nature 

nervously and swiftly, always lighting on some 
twig close by the nest, or upon its edge, in- 
stead of stopping to plume her feathers at 
some distant point in her apple-tree. She de- 
veloped now, too, a ferocity toward other birds 
that kept the immediate neighborhood of the 
nest free of all such feathered tramps and 
brigands. Not a robin or catbird, especially, 
could approach that side of the tree without 
encountering a meteoric descent upon him, 
and a sharp little war-cry. Nor could we go 
up the steps and peep into the nest, at first, 
without hearing a high-keyed humming about 
our ears, and finding a threatening bill angrily 
aimed at our faces. 

But, now that my birds were in the bush, 
how was I to have them actually in the hand, 
as tamed and domestic fowls ? If I waited till 
they were fledged, they would be off, and leave 
me only the empty nest. If I took them be- 
fore they were fledged and weaned, they would 
infallibly die on my hands ; for how could I, 
a big, blundering, featherless mammal, hope 
to take any effectual care of two such delicate 
sprites t Plainly there was but one way to 
succeed : the mother-bird must somehow be 
employed to nurse them for me. But if I were 
to cage her, as I could now easily have done, 
so much accustomed to our presence had she 



Our Tame Hummingbirds 1 1 

become, the result would be what it always is 
when people try to cage grown hummingbirds : 
she would straightway die, and leave her babies 
to starve. No, the mother must be free, and 
the young ones caged. That was the problem. 
So I set about caging the nest and young 
ones. Taking a hemispherical wire-gauze dish- 
cover, which I purloined from the pantry, I 
fixed a wire-gauze bottom to it, in such a way 
that I could at first leave it open, and shut it 
day by day, by degrees. After hanging this in 
the tree near the nest for a couple of days, to 
become a familiar sight, I hung it, bottom-side 
upward, up around the nest. Then, little by 
little, I closed the door, till the mother could 
reach her charges only through a round hole 
just over the nest. All this she accepted so 
quietly, and learned so readily to use, that 
(noticing some fluttering motions in the baby 
sprites, and knowing they would soon be fol- 
lowing their mother through the hole in their 
roof, I now substituted a roomy cage, some 
two and a half feet long, made of wire gauze, 
with a sliding wooden bottom, in which, gradu- 
ally as before, I inclosed the nest from below. 
The mother-bird accepted this also as some 
harmless new freak of the great, homely ani- 
mal that had so long been bothering about her 
premises, — something for which he was prob- 



12 Nature 

ably not to blame, and which it was her duty 
not to make a fuss about. She quickly learned 
to go in through the two-inch aperture that I 
had left in the sliding roof ; but she had diffi- 
culty in finding her way out. Did it need all 
the stimulus of seeing the little ones below 
to bring her whole microscopic mind to bear 
on the question .? At all events, such was the 
case. Facilis descensus Averni ; but in order 
to her emerging again it became necessary for 
me to stand an intermittent guard over my 
contrivance, all day long, pulling the string to 
let her out, then shutting the cage after her 
(all but her necessary doorway for entrance 
again), since the young ones now began to 
take short trial flights within the cage. 

And now came a tragical chapter of the 
story. The poor little mother flew in, one 
morning very early, before any one was on 
guard to let her out. Finding no outlet, and 
imagining, perhaps, that her babies would go 
hungry too long, or, it may be, frightened by 
some outside bird that had glared in on them, 
she had apparently flown round and round the 
cage till exhausted ; for I found her, when I 
paid my customary visit to the tree, lying dead 
in a corner, as if heartbroken with hope de- 
ferred. Most cordially then I wished that I 
had left the wee birdies alone ; and I made 



Our Tame Hummingbirds 13 

bitter reflections — bitter with the bitterness of 
being too late, as reflections on our sins are apt 
to be — about the invariable evils of man's in- 
terference with nature. " Bring back " (I said, 
taking myself metaphorically by the ear), — 
" bring back, if you can, that bright little life 
you have wantonly destroyed." 

But the orphans were now fairly on my 
hands, and it was the time for action, not for 
useless remorse. Do you ask, Where was the 
other parent .? Alas, there was none. Either 
the male had been killed — caught by a cat, 
perhaps, for that does sometimes happen (and 
is a wonderful instance of the instantaneous 
correlation of mind and muscle on the part of 
the cat tribe), or else he was a very bad father 
indeed. For the only sign of a male bird I 
ever saw about the nest was one morning when 
a male darted up to the cage with his fiery 
throat flashing, shot a fierce glance in at the 
young ones, then vanished for good. 

I accepted the situation, took the infants in 
charge, and did nothing else for a week, to 
speak of, but feed them with syrup and watch 
their development. It was the third of July 
when the mother-bird died, and my Independ- 
ence Day was devoted to dipping one finger 
into loaf-sugar-and-water, every fifteen minutes, 
and holding the drop to my birds to sip. 



14 Nature 

It was now my wife's turn to show a lack of 
faith — naturally, since it was this time faith 
in her husband that was required, not faith in 
nature. It was preposterous, she said, to sup- 
pose that I could raise them on nothing but 
sugar-and-water ; for did not all the latest or- 
nithological treatises say that hummingbirds 
feed mainly on insects, seeking flowers for this 
animal food, and not for honey? And did not 
Every Schoolboy know that nitrogenous food 
was necessary for the growth of tissue and the 
support of animal life ? 

Nevertheless, I persevered, and so did the 
birds. Daily their down developed into won- 
derful feathers, and daily their flights about 
the roomy cage were stronger and longer, and 
their pulls deeper at the cup of sugar-and- 
water. The result is (I may as well say now) 
that here are the two small gnomes, at this 
very hour, — a month and a half after I under- 
took their weaning, — flying about the room, 
lighting indifferently on my hair, my ink bottle, 
or my penholder, living refutations of the 
food theories of the ornithologist and his cele- 
brated fellow pundit, Every Schoolboy. Where 
they get their nitrogen I cannot say ; but what 
they feed on is plain sugar-and-water ; and they 
seem to have made a wonderful deal of blood, 
bone, and preternaturally active nerve and 



Our Tame Hiimminghirds 1 5 

muscular tissue out of it. It is not their fault 
— they have never been taught their letters. 
If they had read the standard scientific works 
on the subject, they would doubtless have done 
their best to regulate their digestion and assimi- 
lation more in accordance therewith. 

For the first two weeks of their orphanage I 
am certain they had no other nourishment but 
the syrup, for they only fed as I offered this to 
them, on my finger, or on a flower which I 
sometimes would dip in it, to give it, if pos- 
sible, some tang of the natural garden flavor. 
Of late I have occasionally fed to them, in the 
way of confectionery, newly hatched spiders, 
suspended on a thread of cobweb. It is not 
so easy for them to take an insect. Their 
natural method of doing so, I am convinced, 
is by flying at them with bill wide open (some 
three-quarters of an inch, at the tip), and so 
literally " putting themselves outside " of their 
prey. They seem incapable of seizing an 
insect by the bill point and working it back- 
ward into the gullet. Their tongue is a softish, 
flexible double tube, very perfectly adapted for 
sucking honey-dew from the flower-tubes, but 
(it appears to me) not at all adapted to work 
morsels backward the whole length of the bill. 
For this reason I doubt the statement of the 
books that their object in thrusting the bill into 



16 Nature 

flowers is to capture insects, rather than honey- 
dew. At least, I am certain that my two bant- 
lings never take an insect except by thrusting 
the mouth, open far back, forward around it. 
Nor did I ever see any signs of the mother's 
catching an insect to feed her young. Her 
method of feeding was to join bills with one of 
them for some fifteen seconds at a time, evi- 
dently feeding it bird-/<7/, or food already par- 
tially digested for them. I might add, as to 
this point, that I never could detect a hum- 
mingbird in the act of opening its bill in a 
flower, in any such way as to be able to take in 
an insect. The action of the bill and head, on 
the contrary, seems precisely that of my pets 
when sipping syrup from their cup. Yet they 
are fond of little spiders, and such small deer, 
and no doubt capture many of them while on 
the wing. 

Through the warm weeks of July, I kept the 
cage still in the tree where the babes were 
born, lowering it by a cord and pulley to feed 
them, and hoisting it again to sway among the 
dancing apple leaves. When the nights be- 
came cool, they were carried into the green- 
house to sleep, staying out through the day. 
But now that autumn weather has set in, with 
frequent clouds, and thinner sunshine, they 
live altogether with their foster parents in the 



Our Tame Hummingbirds 1 7 

house, where they are carried from room to 
room to follow the sun, for the sunshine is 
their life. Nothing ever so impressed me with 
the absolute dependence of all living things on 
the great source of light, heat, electricity, and 
of whatever as yet unknown forces are inter- 
mingled in the mysterious movements of vital- 
ity, as the sight of the hummingbirds and their 
relations to the sun. When a sudden thick 
cloud obscures the warm beams, they feel the 
change instantly. In ten seconds their vivacity 
has vanished. They become quiet, the wings 
droop a little, the sparkle of the eye is dulled, 
the feathers are puffed up. When the sun 
breaks out again, it is as if the ray struck them 
off the perch into mid-flight, kindling all their 
vivid intensity of life at once. Decidedly, the 
sun-worshipers of old had some reason on 
their side. 

Every day they have an hour or two of free 
flight about the rooms, and this is their great 
play spell. School is out, and they chase each 
other with all manner of pretty antics from one 
extemporized perch to another. One of their 
favorite resting-places is the window-seat, where 
they hover about the glass, — recognizing it for 
glass as well as any grown folks, and never 
bumping against it, to hurt themselves, — gaz- 
ing out upon the great world, and sometimes 



18 Nature 

catching a minute fly. This capture, however, 
seems to be more for fun than food ; for no 
matter how few or how many they find, every 
ten minutes or so they buzz back to the cage, 
drop dexterously through the small scuttle- 
hole in its roof, and seek their syrup-cup for 
luncheon. 

Of course the babes were christened while 
still very young. The male is yclept Peasblos- 
som ; the female, Cobweb. It will suggest 
itself as an obvious objection that the Mid- 
summer Night's " Cobweb " was addressed as 
" Master," not " Miss." And again as " Mon- 
sieur," as where the transmogrified weaver 
exclaims : — 

" Monsieur Cobweb, good monsieur, get 
your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red- 
hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle ; 
and, good monsieur, bring me the honey-bag. 
Do not fret yourself too much in the action, 
monsieur ; and, good monsieur, have a care 
the honey-bag break not ; I would be loath to 
have you overflown with the honey-bag, sei- 
gnior." But it may well be doubted whether 
the speaker was in a state of mind favorable to 
accurate observation, or whether the respective 
styles of dress of gentleman and lady fairies 
were familiar to him. And then, too, he was 
only a donkey, after all. 



Our Tame Hummingbirds 19 

Cobweb has been true to the enterprising 
nature of her sex in twice getting away, while 
out of doors. On both occasions she made 
straight for their old home, the apple-tree. 
The first time, I climbed up into the tree, 
gently put my hand over her, and brought 
her back, unresisting, but not without some 
squeaks of protest. The second time, she 
returned of her own accord, after a few min- 
utes' flight, induced thereto partly by a fright- 
ful catbird, who made up faces at her and 
called her names, and from whose harsh voice 
she fled home squeaking with fear. 

Every morning they enjoy a dainty bath in a 
shallow sea-shell. It is no noisy splash, such 
as big, clumsy canaries or chipping-birds make ; 
but floating softly an instant over the water, 
half supported by its surface and half in the 
air, they drop their little folded feet delicately 
in till they touch the pearly bottom ; then for 
a second the wing-tips and the tail just graze 
the water, and they are off again to the rim of 
the shell, perhaps to repeat the performance 
after a moment's fluttering, and dressing of 
their elfin plumage. 

Their most comical aspect is at night when 
asleep. As soon as it begins to grow dusk, 
they perch close together on an ivory knitting 
needle in an upper corner of the cage, which is 



20 Nature 

their favorite bedchamber, and sleep snuggled 
up to each other as tight as two kittens. On 
one occasion only they had a quarrel {taiitcem 
irce. in animis cxlestibus T) ; and that night they 
went to sleep as far apart as they could pos- 
sibly get, at the two ends of their perch. Of 
course it is out of the question for them to get 
their heads under their absurd little wings, so 
they content themselves with ruffling up their 
feathers till each bird is but a little fluffy ball, 
the size of a walnut, closing up their eyes as 
tight as possible, and slanting their rigid, 
needle-like bills upward at a steep angle. 
There they sit bunched up together till broad 
daylight. The lighting of the gas does not 
awaken them, but we can see sometimes that 
they are having dreams. Their small heads 
quiver slightly, and their bills vibrate, and my 
wife avers that the motions of Cobweb's bill 
indicate that she is dreaming of nestlings and 
of giving them food ; but for this I will not 
vouch. 

Peasblossom is by far the saucier of the two. 
If one holds out a finger to him when he is 
humming about the room, he will dart down 
and perch on it, swinging his head rhythmically 
from side to side, and seeming to inspect one 
curiously, as if with dim reminiscences of Bot- 
tom the weaver, and wonder where the " fair 



Our Tame Hummingbirds 21 

large ears " and " amiable cheeks " are gone. 
Sometimes he will feel, or feign, sudden mis- 
givings of you, and will ruffle his crest and 
flash his black eyes, as much as to say, " I 've 
a mind to tear you limb from limb, you big, 
unfeathered monster ! " 

For the most part the little creatures have 
very happy lives. They are safe from shrikes 
and cats and boys ; nor do they suffer, so far 
as one can see, from any of those vague ances- 
tral terrors that human beings know as super- 
stitions and nightmare fears. They want but 
little here below — namely, their small glass 
cup occasionally replenished with sufficiently 
liquid and pellucid sugar-water ; and from 
above they ask only sunshine. If, besides, 
they have a taste of midget or infant spider, 
that is clear gain, like candy tq the schoolboy. 
Yet they have not been wholly without mis- 
haps. Once they were left out too long in a 
suddenly falling temperature, and when I went 
for them. Cobweb lay apparently lifeless on the 
floor in a corner of the cage. I laid her softly 
on the palm of my hand, and she showed no 
signs of life except a scarcely perceptible 
breathing. But after five minutes of indoor 
sunshine, combined with the heat (and who 
knows if some more subtile stimulus, imparted 
from the human vitality) of my hand, her breath 



22 Nature 

came more quickly, her eyes opened, and she 
sipped a drop of syrup, and was immediately as 
wide awake as ever. 

How they are to be kept warm and (what is 
more) sun-bathed in the long, dark winter of 
our euphemistically termed " temperate " zone, 
is a question of much interest in our household. 
My wife suggests a red flannel jacket for each 
bird. Something in the way of a pocket fur- 
nace, with a small electric light for daytimes, 
perhaps could be devised. In any kind of 
fairness we ought to migrate with them to 
Mexico. Very likely we ourselves should find 
such an annual flitting beneficial. Indeed, has 
not man made a mistake in supposing himself 
to be by nature a hibernating, instead of a 
migratory creature ? Will not the coming man 
discover that, at any given season of the year, 
it is the best place for him where it is the best 
place for the hummingbird ? 

If we fail to keep them in our coming dark 
and cold weather, and they peak and pine and 
die, the old question will recur with a remorse- 
ful sting to it, — whether it is not always and 
intrinsically cruel to cage a wild bird. There 
are obviously two sides to it. One may con- 
tend, with at least some plausibility, that to 
cage a wild bird is only to introduce it to a 
higher plane of existence. Is not all civiliza- 



Our Tame Hummingbirds 23 

tion a kind of caging process ? We take the 
sa7is culotte and happy savage, button him into 
those " fetters of a falser Hfe " — clothes, crib 
and confine his wayward freedom with rules of 
etiquette, rules of politeness, rules of morality, 
— artificial restrictions of all sorts. Whereas 
he was savage, now we call him civilized ; but 
whereas he was free, is he not now caged ? In 
the case of man, to speak honestly, we know 
very well that in reality we have enlarged his 
true liberty by this apparently restrictive pro- 
cess. We have really freed him from a thou- 
sand dangers, and slaveries to brute nature 
that belong to all barbarous existence, and 
given him as many new powers and possibili- 
ties. " And yet " — the mind still doubts ; 
and in the summer vacations, when we dash 
away from civilized employments to the savage 
delights of slaying trout and deer and mos- 
quitoes, the doubt rises to a kind of wild asser- 
tion that freedom^ after all, is the best thing, 
even if we have to go to the woods to find it. 

And so, even more surely, of the birds — 
those very incarnations of blithe, sweet liberty. 
Capture them, wise reader, only with the im- 
agination. Enjoy my hummingbird, with me, 
as I sit here — one representative of a certain 
overgrown, conceited, bungling, wingless spe- 
cies of the animal kingdom — trying to under- 



24 Nature 

stand better my " world not realized " for the 
presence of these other two little vertebrates 
who sit with me ; both put together not so big 
as my thumb ; one of them pluming his emer- 
ald breast as he surmounts a crease of my 
coat-sleeve, the other perched on my ink-stand, 
trying to look wise, yet too obviously thinking 
only of " victuals and drink." But if you are 
indeed what the old-fashioned writers always 
appealed to — my " gentle " reader — do not 
follow my rash example. Let the birds go 
free. Do with them as Goethe said we do 
with the stars — " admire them, love them, but 
not desire them for our own." 

For I must needs, to be wholly truthful, add 
here a tragic postscript. The dark fall days 
came ; there was a whole week without a 
gleam of good sunshine ; and in spite of all 
our contrivances and our cares, the two bright 
and beautiful little lives slipped out of their 
cage and fled away. 



A RHAPSODY OF CLOUDS 

" O ETHER divine ! " cried Prometheus ; but 
he was chained supine on the rock, and forced 
to see the sky. We who walk erect at will are 
apt to confine our attention to the things of 
earth. There are two landscapes, two firma- 
ments, always visible to us ; but it is as if, by 
some secret compact, the upper and finer one 
were reserved apart for birds and poets, or for 
the forlorn face that here and there turns up- 
ward in search of some better justice or fairer 
hope than has been found on earth. Now and 
then we find a person who has the habit of 
looking at the night skies, and mayhap knows 
the constellations, so that the stars are not 
accidental sparks to him any longer, but old 
friends, any one of whose faces would be missed 
if it were withdrawn. But who looks upward 
by day and sees the clouds 1 

There are ways of enticing people, or re- 
minding ourselves, to appreciate this neglected 
side (the upper side) of landscape. It is no 
sin to improve upon Nature, or at least upon 
our physical endowments for apprehending her 



26 Nature 

beauty. The camera obscura is one such con- 
trivance. Fix a suitable lens in the front of 
any old box, with a dark curtain under which 
to thrust the head, and the " divine ether," 
with its cloud-cuckoo-town of shifting scenery, 
will stoop to our infirmity, and mimic itself in 
little — but with all its glorious light and color 
— below our face. The Claude Lorraine glass 
is another simple instrument of magical effect. 
The great landscape that seemed too vast to 
look at, in its sweep of valley and woods and 
hills and sky, comes into the compass of the 
hand, with the lights and shades and hues all 
there, but mellowed and softened ; it is beau- 
tiful as ever, but it all floats on the facet of a 
crystal ; the big giant has eaten of Alice's cake 
in Wonderland, and becomes a heavenly child ; 
the finite eye has captured the infinite distance 
by a pretty trick. The poet Gray, it is said, 
used always to carry a common lens in his 
pocket when he " walked abroad," in whose 
surface to see the landscape imaged ; thus, we 
may suppose, to bring it nearer the compass of 
an elegy or an ode. 

But this present screed was entered upon in 
order to recommend to all lovers of nature the 
use of still another bit of artifice for aiding the 
natural eye to see the supernatural beauties and 
wonders of sky-and-cloud scenery. I mean the 



A Rhapsody of Clouds 27 

ordinary smoked glasses of the optician's shop. 
They should not be colored glasses at all, but 
just sufficiently clouded with a colorless smoke- 
tint to tone down the intensity of the brightest 
light. The test should be that one can gaze 
fixedly at a bright, sunlit white cloud floating 
in noonday blue, without trying the eye. I 
do not believe (though I am no optician) that 
the ordinary habitual use of such glasses is to 
be recommended, except where the eye impera- 
tively demands protection. They are rather 
for special emergencies, such as a dusty wind- 
storm in the city, to keep the awning-posts and 
paving-blocks out of one's eyes ; or on the 
snow slopes of a mountain, to blunt the intol- 
erable glare ; or in a railroad car, to fend off 
cinders blundering in through an open window ; 
and especially for this aesthetical use of which 
I speak. One feels, on using them for the first 
time, that he never before has properly seen a 
cloud, for the reason that never before has he 
been able to look steadily right into the face 
and eyes of a brilliant noonday sky. 

In this way, with the shield of the soft-toned 
glasses before the eyes, one no longer gives a 
general look at the heavens now and then, with 
a hasty glance, as to know whether it is neces- 
sary to take an umbrella, but he seats himself 
before it, as before the surf, or before a play 



28 Nature 

at the theatre, to watch deliberately what goes 
on. Nor does he any longer look at an indi- 
vidual cloud that is pointed out for some 
grotesque shape or some remarkable color ; but 
he sees the whole field, the complex groupings 
of forms and tints, the marchings and counter- 
marchings of the sky battalions. One might 
as well suppose he knew the wonders of forest 
scenery when he had only looked at single 
trees, as to imagine he had seen the clouds 
when he had only glanced hastily at an occa- 
sional cloud. There are wonderful mountains 
among them, with sheer precipices, and shad- 
owy caves, and Alpine crags ; dark towers, 
such as Childe Roland blew his blast before ; 
minarets and domes, with mysterious ara- 
besque of Oriental tracery ; serene ocean shores 
where the gray sand glimmers through shoal- 
ing blue, and the round-breasted galleons sail 
smoothly over. 

It is great to sit in a lawn-chair, of a summer 
Sunday afternoon, and gaze undazzled into the 
upper sky. A light breeze taps the pear-tree 
leaves softly, as a mother might pat together 
the palms of her child. The organ snores 
sleepily in the distant church : even the choir 
sounds musical, heard faintly and occasionally, 
as if it were a far-off memory of better music. 
The blue of the zenith is intense with light that 



A Rhapsody of Clouds 29 

would be unbearable to the unshielded eye, and 
as the Cleopatra's barges of slow clouds sail 
softly across, with their round, bellying sails 
of snow and pearl, it only makes the azure 
more " deeply and darkly " blue. By and by 
the color, or the very depth and boundlessness 
of it, seems to inundate one's brain, as the 
blue, deep sea-tide Hfts through a coral reef, 
and all the little ocean-creatures stretch out 
their delicate hands and feed confidingly in the 
lucid clearness. So do delicate brain-fancies 
float and feed tranquilly in this inflooding tide 
of the blue heavens. 

Nor is all this without its possibility of solid 
scientific usefulness. O dear specialist, that 
inclinest to flout such skyey contemplations ! 
Why do those clouds float there so buoyantly ; 
and what makes the cirrus take on those feath- 
ery forms ? Do not tell me it is the wind, un- 
less I am to believe there be winds celestial, 
very different from winds terrestrial. Those 
filmy tufts, those lightest dabs, drawn out in 
wavy brush-lines, as if with a pencil dipped in 
sublimated wool, or in the quintessence of dis- 
solved cobweb, — is it by electricity or mag- 
netism ? Or have some of those puffy-cheeked 
cherubs, seen so commonly tilting about the 
mediaeval skies by the old masters, but not any 
more seen with the naked eye, — -, have some of 



30 Nature 

these bodiless baby-heads blown them at one 
another, for a game ? 

Even thou, O dear Gradgrindling, canst find 
thine account in this sky-gazing ! It is even 
of " use," " practically." For there is no better 
barometer, or prophet of the weather, than 
such a film of cloud as one sees yonder. If it 
grows and grows, as we watch it (not that we 
can see it grow, — cloud prophets are too sub- 
tle for that ; but if we see from moment to mo- 
ment that it has grown), then we may know it 
will pretty surely rain. While if it fade and 
fade, and suddenly we find ourselves only re- 
membering what was, — for it is not any more, 
— then we may pretty safely leave the unbrella 
at home. 

Some days the outlines of the clouds are all 
making faces at each other : merry faces, if one 
feels in that mood, and therefore unconsciously 
compels the eye to that selection of forms ; 
solemn faces, if that be the masterful feeling. 
Why should the profiles generally be looking 
from right to left.? Or is that only an idio- 
syncrasy of my own ? With me it is so on 
wall-paper, it is so in the cloud-tapestry of the 
sky; my mind, if for the moment idle, perpet- 
ually sees faces, nearly always profiles, and 
nearly always looking to the left. Is it because 
one sketches a profile on paper with the right 



A Rhapsody of Clouds 31 

hand, and so with the projecting points toward 
the left, away from the hand, which otherwise 
would hide them ? Some poet may say, if he 
chooses to, that it is with all the faces and 
aspects of this universe as with those of the 
clouds, — that all look smiling and benevolent 
to us, or grim and forbidding, according to 
our own voluntary state of heart; but I will 
not say it, for I am not perfectly sure it is true. 
The poet will probably say it if he only hopes 
it is true. 

When presently we are able to sail the air 
in the coming balloon, it will be pleasant to 
make afternoon excursions among the summer 
clouds. We shall rendezvous here and there in 
their recesses. " Come ! " one will say to his 
friend ; " let us talk it over on the rosy south- 
west corner of that mother-of-pearl mountain 
in the sky." Or we shall bid John unpack the 
luncheon basket in the shade of yonder floating 
shelf of foamy ivory ; or we shall agree to meet, 
at half past two, just under the billowy chin 
of what seems an aerial Martha Washington. 

How can so soft and fluffy a texture, an airy 
pile of bird's breasts and gossamer, hold so 
firm an outline against the blue, and catch such 
a splendor of intense light t As it comes float- 
ing and toppling across the sky, one would like 
to shoot a feather-bed up through it, and let 



32 Nature 

the azure through the soft hole. Or one would 
like to see an angel out of " Paradise Lost," or, 
better, out of Dante's " Paradiso," push the 
yielding curtains of it aside, and for an awed 
and heart-beating moment look earnestly, half 
smiling, down upon the earth. 

It is a dead enough world, if people merely 
glance at it with the rambling, unsteady eye of 
a preoccupied mind. Water, for example, — 
what is it but drinkable fluid, or oxygen and 
hydrogen, to the average mortal ? The " prim- 
rose by the river's brim " and the river by its 
own brim are equally stale, flat, and unprofit- 
able. But let a man look close, — say, at the 
tense muscle of the running stream, or the 
bubble-shadows on the sands in the eddy, each 
with a yellow star in its centre ; then the water 
is a living wonder. And these clouds — an 
every-day affair, no doubt, a " useful trouble," 
to most apprehensions ; but if we look dose we 
cannot but take in the unimagined beauty of 
them. Changeful as the sea, over which they 
have sailed so many leagues that they have 
taken on a certain mimicry of the intricate 
forms of ocean-waves, they are without the 
quick, criss-cross fret and restlessness of the 
sea ; for the clouds are nearly always calm : 
over its " restlessness," their " rest." Yet they 
are never still ; the gossamer tracery, if you 



A Rhapsody of Clouds 33 

watch it, is all alive, as if the films and veins 
of agate should come to life, and begin to 
weave and unweave their interchanging fibres. 

There is another odd and interesting effect 
of the dark glasses. When one takes them off, 
after a prolonged gaze through them, the whole 
world gains suddenly a new splendor. It is 
like a sforzando chord in a symphony of 
Rubinstein's. Or it is like a sudden bracing 
up of the spirit when one concludes to fling off 
a dusky mood, and enters the sunshine of some 
hearty action. 

It is not often that we can watch, near by, 
the rapid formation of cloud ; but it once hap- 
pened to me, in climbing among the " Ameri- 
can Alps," — the Sierra Nevada, — to find my- 
self on a crag precisely underneath the line of 
low cloud formation. Leaning back to rest 
against the rock, and looking upward, I saw 
the mountain drapery weaving, itself — out of 
nothing, as it appeared : blue air on one side 
of the line ; dark slaty films (nearest it), then 
shreds, then masses of flying cloud, on the 
other. Clear across the sky extended the dis- 
tinct edge of this swift and incessant weaving. 
It was like nothing but a great shadowy banner 
streaming out in the gale from an invisible 
cord strained tight across the sky. It was the 
work of the Earth Spirit in Faust : — 



34 Nature 

" At the roaring loom of Time I ply, 
And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by." 

Sometimes, with the eyes shielded by their 
smoke-tint armor against the blinding splendor 
of the summer blue contrasting with its dark 
cloud scenery, we may attend a thunder-storm 
symphony in the air. Solemnly the curtain 
begins to rise ; the wind carries it, for there is 
a wild w4nd far up in the heavens, though as 
yet all is still below. There is a deep hush 
upon us all, — the trees, and birds, and the 
rest of us in the audience, for we are full of 
expectancy. It grows insensibly darker and 
darker in " the hall of the firmament." There 
are rolls of distant thunder, — it is the orches- 
tra, and the instruments are being tuned ; you 
hear the contra-basses trying a chromatic pas- 
sage in hesitating touches. There is some 
trilogy of Wagner's toward ; for the stage is 
preparing, and the scenes are slowly shifting, 
— lofty walls of cloud that move silently to 
one side and the other ; but no celestial actors 
emerge, and the azure floor remains empty. 
Or possibly they are there, but invisible ; as 
most of the orchestral harmonies are still 
inaudible, 

" Whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close us in," — 

all but those louder and bolder double-basses. 



A Rhapsody of Clouds 35 

and the rolling and rattling crescendo of the 
drums. By and by a flash of keen lightning 
blazes out, like the crash of brazen cymbals 
threaded with the shrilling piccolo. 

At such times you may occasionally catch 
a strange effect. You are looking through a 
deep cleft in the black clouds, cut down across 
the sky, at the brilliant blue between. Sud- 
denly a lightning flash completely reverses, for 
just an instant, the light and shade ; the 
gloomy cloud-walls gleam out intensely lumi- 
nous, while the towering shaft of intervening 
sky is dark by contrast, and so starts forward 
tangibly from the distance, like a momentary 
incarnation of some black genie of the Arabian 
Nights. 

On some more tranquil August afternoon, 
when the sky-dome is lifted to its serenest 
height, and only pearly cirrus, so far up as 
almost to be motionless, bars it from being 
infinite, we may recline in our couch-chair and 
gaze upward so long and steadily that we 
drowse a little. Or, if still awake, we seem to 
lose ourselves in space. It is as if there were 
a second sort of sleep possible to us ; not the 
withdrawal of the consciousness back into the 
inner brain, as in night slumber, but the expan- 
sion or floating out of the consciousness into 
the deeps of outer existence. Is it any wonder 



36 Nature 

if sometimes, then, the methodical reason gives 
way to flitting fancies, and, while the clouds 
flow slowly and smoothly across the upper 
world, our reveries run into rhythm, and such 
things get themselves written as this with which 
we close? 

CLOUD TRACERY 

What wind from what celestial wood hath sown 
Such delicate seed as springs in air, and turns 
The blue heaven-garden to a bed of ferns 
In feathery cloud ? They are not tossed, or blown 

To such wild shapes, but motionless they ride, 
Like a celestial frost-work on the pane 
Of our sky-window, where the breath has lain 
Of the pure cold upon the thither side. 

They are but pencil touches, soft and light. 
Traced faintly under some magnetic spell 
By an entranced spirit, that would write 

Hints of heaven-language ere the soul's release, — 

Dim outlines of the syllables that tell 

Of words like faith, and confidence, and peace. 



CHEERFULNESS OF BIRDS 

We are, at our house, I confess, a rather 
sombre family. There are no young children 
among us. The elderly people are silent by 
temperament, and grow more silent as age 
comes on. There is never any ill-temper in 
the house, — never any bickering or nagging, 
no spiteful epigrams or sidelong sarcasms. 
We seem really to like each other, although 
we are all " blood-relations." We get on, 
therefore, from year to year. No doubt we 
seem to others a happy family, and perhaps 
we are ; but we are never a merry family. The 
house is so built that the rooms where the sun 
shines liberally are not the rooms most used ; 
not the rooms, for example, that we are accus- 
tomed to use together. The heating apparatus 
is that most successful and most lugubrious 
one, — steam. The radiators are large black 
surfaces, with just enough of gilt at edge and 
corner to make the black hopelessly conspicu- 
ous, flattening themselves against the wall as if 
they were aware of their ugliness. No blazing 
and sparkling and cheerily snapping open fire 



38 Nature 

illuminates any of the " living " rooms. (The 
kitchen is the most cheerful place in the house, 
— as I have occasionally seen it, empty and 
deserted, after the cook and the maid had 
retired at night, — with the rich hot coals still 
sending out their rays merrily through chink 
and crevice of the range, for the sole benefit of 
the house-cat, stretched out vi^ith full abandon 
on the toasting-hot hearth.) Our deplorable 
habit, at meals, is to attend to the business in 
hand with grave decorum, — very decently and 
in order, no doubt, but for the most part 
silently. I have known some one of us, ap- 
parently for the moment sensible of something 
oppressive in this gravity, to venture on a 
frivolous remark, and to have it received in 
silence, as a thing not congruous with the roast 
meat, especially during the solemn action 
of its being carved and distributed. We come 
down to breakfast not at all out of humor 
(we are not invalids), but disposed to a very 
calm and peaceful demeanor. We wish each 
other good-morning with a genuine affection, 
but the remark, having been responded to, is 
not followed up. An observation concerning 
the weather does not usually lead anywhere. 
When we have a more lively visitor, we easily 
fall in with his mood, and are capable of a 
good deal of sprightliness on such an occasion, 



Cheerfulness of Birds 39 

— not in the least labored or affected, either ; 
but by ourselves we are habitually silent, and 
occupied with our own sedate reflections. 

All this makes — I cannot but see it and 
feel it, much as I myself share in the responsi- 
bility — a sombre house. 

But there is one bright spot, and that fur- 
nishes the text of my utterances now upon the 
subject. It is the tame canary, " Johnny-quil." 
Not only is he himself always cheerful (and 
who ever saw a well canary depressed ?), but 
he is the cause of cheerfulness in others. In 
the midst of one of our long silences we hear 
his little pipe ringing out from his sunny eyrie 
in the porch or the sitting-room, and some 
one remarks, "Just hear Johnny-quil ! " Our 
barometers all go up ten degrees. Besides, 
everybody chirrups to him. It is not only, 
therefore, what he says to us, but what we say 
to him, that makes him the enlivener of the 
family. You can't exactly chirrup to a grown- 
up human being, — especially if he is carving 
a fowl, or reading a religious newspaper. But 
it is always possible, and apparently always in- 
evitable, to say something chipper and chirpy 
to the bird, as we pass his cage. I have no- 
ticed this odd thing: that when Rhodora or 
Penelope or Cassandra stops at the cage, and 
says some little nonsensical thing to the small 



40 Nature 

yellow songster, or half whistles to him in pass- 
ing, not only does he pipe up, but pretty soon 
you hear her own voice, from a distant room, 
humming a bit of some gay waltz or madrigal. 
The unconscious lifting of one's own more 
sober mood to the higher level of the bird's 
irrepressible good spirits lasts on a little be- 
yond the instant. I recommend him and his 
merry kind to other silent houses. He is worth 
his weight in sunshine. 



THE RED LEAVES ON THE SNOW 

The years monotonous ? The same old sea- 
sons, and weathers, and aspects of nature ? 
Never anything new to admire or wonder at ? 
The monotony is in our eyesight, which goes 
on seeing nothing but the common and invari- 
able things ; simply because, from long famil- 
iarity, these are the easy things to see. But 
these are only the frame of the picture ; the 
picture itself is never twice alike. 

Suppose, to test it, we should open a ledger 
account with Nature. It should be headed. 
The Face of Nature in Account with an Ex- 
acting Mind. On the left-hand page should be 
entered the Dr, side of the account ; namely, 
to all the phenomena of the year that we could 
fairly stigmatize as the " same everlasting old 
thing." On the right-hand page should go the 
Cr. ; namely, by all the aspects of land or sea 
or sky that in any candor we must confess 
never before to have been noticed by us. 

For example, " February 3d. Dr. To a pale 
sunrise, going into a low-spirited forenoon of 
leaden cloud. Have seen this hundreds of 



42 Nature 

times before." Or, "August 20th. Dr. To 
a hot afternoon. Sleepy. Palm -leaf fans. 
Shower at five o'clock. Bumbles and boom- 
bles of approaching thunder. Scalding water. 
One sharp flash and crack. Three rolling 
peals, going r, r, r, bang; r, r, r, boong ; br, r, 
bo Jig, BANG, br, r, m, m, m. Same old thunder- 
shower." 

Of the Cr. side of the account, the items 
which led me to begin this paper, and which 
I am about to mention, will furnish a good 
example. 

It is the 7th of November. The first snow 
came in the night, and this morning we had 
that annual experience of drawing the curtain, 
and looking out a little shiveringly, and say- 
ing, " A white world ! Winter has come, sure 
enough." Ten inches of snow; and, all day, 
more powdered down in successive puffs and 
squalls. One minute, all blue sky, and the sun 
flashing on everything ; the next, you see the 
northwest obscured, and the dun cloud rapidly 
covering the whole heavens, its upper edge 
fringed with light snow-scud brushed out be- 
fore it in wisps and flying locks. Suddenly 
the air is thick with the falhng and whirling 
flakes. It is like the glass toy box we had 
when children, which we turned upside down, 
and scattered a thick white shower on the 



The Red Leaves on the Snow 43 

wooden trees and the whittled c/ia/e^ and herds- 
men. 

These gusty squalls have brought down the 
last "flying gold" of the autumn trees. Yester- 
day the maples and oaks and the great round- 
topped linden on the lawn were still full of 
their wealth of color. There it lies now on 
the snow, — smouldering reds and yellows, 
burning with dusky blushes on (not in, as ordi- 
narily) the level floor of the white cold. This 
is what I meant I had not seen before : the 
autumn lying in this literal fashion on the win- 
ter's breast. Commonly the carpet of the 
fallen leaves is all down before the cold white 
feet of the snowstorms come to dance upon it. 
(If these metaphors seem to tread on each 
other's heels a little, a squall or two may be 
supposed to have intervened.) 

The prettiest thing, however, in this particu- 
lar case of the first snow, is the way its soft- 
ness, early in the night, caused it to stick fast, 
silvering the windward side of every object. 
Not only are the firs deep loaded, the lower 
boughs weighted and banked till each tree is, 
from the ground up, a continuous tent of snow, 
but the trunks and every round limb and fork- 
ing twig of the elms and oaks are puffed with 
fleckless white. It makes of them a vivid kind 
of crayon sketch : every bough has its dark 



44 Nature 

shadow away from the sun, and its white high- 
light toward the wind. The gate-posts are 
capped high with the rounded ermine. In the 
side of one of these snowcaps I carefully 
scooped out a little cave ; then, removing my 
glove, I cautiously (so as not to dismantle the 
fluffy entrance) thrust in my bare hand and 
held it there. Almost instantly I could feel 
the warmth reflected from the translucent walls. 
For the first time (another item on the Cr. side 
of our account-book), I not only could under- 
stand, but sejise, how the prairie-hens and over- 
taken travelers can, like cunning children with 
their mothers, escape the castigation of the 
snow by fleeing to the snow's own bosom. 

The little wren-house on the stub of the 
dead pear-tree is piled thick to windward, and 
fringed with icicles on the eaves to leeward, 
like the abodes of all the rest of us. Across 
the river, on the crown of the slope, stands a 
straight high wall of woods. It is a reversed 
drawing in charcoal ; all the tops, the soft mass 
of bare boughs and twigs, being shaded dark, 
while the stems of the tall hickories and oaks 
stand forth white as marble columns. 

On the smooth snow of the lawn stands a 
slender upright wand, left solitary in the de- 
serted tennis-court, where it supported the net 
in the middle. The adhering fleece has made 



77?^ Red Leaves on the Snow 45 

of it only a delicate rapier-blade of snow. 
Shining there in the sun, scarcely more tan- 
gible than its faint blue shadow, a slim white 
line, pure, cold, still, — what a beautiful baton 
for conducting some symphony of Mendels- 
sohn ; or a stylus for tracing the icy music of 

's poetry; or a gnomon for some frosty 

moon-dial, whereon to mark the saintly hours 
of 's life. 



THE EARTH-SPIRIT'S VOICES 

Sometimes it is difficult to keep from be- 
lieving that the earth has voices, " mystic, 
wonderful," whose weird message continually 
tries to get itself delivered to our ear. 

Every one has had the experience of stand- 
ing in the midst of the woods, some still sum- 
mer day, when the leaves and sprays hung 
motionless, and the silence was profound. 
Presently you are aware of a stir in the tree- 
tops. It is not so much an audible sound, at 
first, as an invisible movement, apprehended 
only by the most delicate tentacles of the sense 
of hearing. Then it rises to a soft murmur, 
and dies away. Again you hear it, farther off 
this time, but approaching. It is the Voice of 
the woods. But this is not all. I have fancied 
that beneath this murmurous surf-sound there 
lurks a still more mysterious undertone ; as if 
there were other Voices, never daring to speak 
with each other except when the wind is blow- 
ing to mask their presence. With each other 
— or is it not rather that they are trying to 
communicate with our human spirit ? As I 



The Earth-Spirit's Voices 47 

hear them, I imagine troops of little eager 
faces, pressing as near me as they dare, or as 
they are permitted, watching for the swelling 
of the wind, and hushing each other as it falls 
to silence. 

But the message, if indeed there be one that 
the earth-spirit is thus trying to deliver, will 
hardly be conveyed by these delicate elves of 
the wood. They are too timid, too fearful of 
the quiet, and conditioned upon other sounds 
which mask but confuse their burden. 

I think that the message will ultimately be 
conveyed by the Voices of the river. Their 
music, for one thing, is nearest that of human 
speech. I remember one night when we were 
camped by the McCloud River, deep in the 
heart of the redwood forest in northern Cali- 
fornia. There was no moon. Far above us 
the great plumy tops of the redwoods, own kin 
to the giant trees of the Sierras, rose like ca- 
thedral roof and towers, and hid the starlight. 
The aisles below were empty and silent, and 
mysterious with that soul of shadow that haunts 
the solitary woods at night. The aisles were 
silent, but not the choir. For, a stone's-throw 
to the right, the Voices of the clear, deep river 
were talking and laughing all night long. They 
were perfectly human tones. There would run 
on for a few moments an even, continuous 



48 Nature 

babble ; then out of it would rise a mingled 
peal of musical laughter, like bells, or clear 
pebbles striking together, or tinkling of ice, 
yet all the time human. Then there would 
run merry chucklings up and down the river ; 
and then a shout would arise, away down 
stream, and another ; and then all the hurry- 
ing Voices would talk loudly together ; and 
then a moment's quiet ; and then, again, inex- 
tinguishable laughter. 

If I had lain there alone, perhaps I might 
have understood some fragment of this inar- 
ticulate music, or speech. But perhaps, too, I 
might have paid for it by never hearing mortal 
accents more j so weirdly this tumult of elfin 
syllables wrought upon me, even well com- 
panioned as I was, there in the dimness and 
unearthly solitude of the starlit forest. 

I never heard these Voices of the river again 
till one night they rose from the orchestra, in 
the Rhine Nymphs' song. I do not think 
Wagner understood them, any more than I ; 
he merely transcribed them from the river. 
It was strange to think that there they were, 
in uncomprehended echo, again appealing to 
mortal spirits across the barrier of the limited 
human intelligence. 

At sea, also, I once heard this unavailing 
cry. It was a hundred miles, and more, from 



T1)e Earth-Spirit's J^oices 49 

the coast of Brazil. The night was clear star- 
light, the breeze light and steady, so that we 
were sailing silently. The stillness, indeed, 
was so unusual that we were all leaning at the 
weather rail, listening to it, and peering far off 
into the vanishing waste of waves. Suddenly 
a distant cry arose from the night; no one 
could say where, or how. Then it was twice 
repeated : not a human cry, that is certain ; 
perhaps a sea-bird's, but not like that of any 
bird or beast I ever heard. If it expressed 
anything, it was not pain nor fear, but some 
intense, infinitely lonely desire. 

It is no wonder the Greeks felt the earth to 
be a spirit. If we are not all pantheists, the 
wonder is that we are not all mythologists, at 
least. Sometimes it has seemed to me as these 
following lines endeavor to express : — 

NATURE AND HER CHILD 

As some poor child whose soul is windowless, 
Having not hearing, speech, nor sight, sits lone 
In her dark, silent life, till cometh one 
"With a most patient heart, who tries to guess 

Some hidden way to help her helplessness ; 

And, yearning for that spirit shut in stone, 

A crystal that has never seen the sun, 

Smooths now the hair, and now the hand will press, 



50 Nature 

Or gives a key to touch, then letters raised, 

Its symbol ; then an apple, or a ring. 

And again letters, — so, all blind and dumb. 

We wait ; the kindly smiles of summer come, 

And soft winds touch our cheek, and thrushes sing ; 

The world-heart yearns, but we stand dull and dazed. 

At another time the relation of the world to 
the human spirit has seemed to be more truth- 
fully hinted at in lines like these : — 

THE FOSTER-MOTHER 

As some poor Indian woman 

A captive child receives. 
And warms it in her bosom, 

And o'er its weeping grieves ; 

And comforts it with kisses. 

And strives to understand 
Its eager, lonely babble, 

Fondling the little hand, — 

So Earth, our foster-mother. 
Yearns for us, with her great 

Wild heart, and croons in murmurs 
Low, inarticulate. 

She knows we are white captives, 

Her dusky race above, 
But the deep, childless bosom 

Throbs with its brooding love. 



HUMAN NATURE IN CHICKENS 

I AM convinced that one important way to 
acquire a profound knowledge of human na- 
ture is to study it in chickens. The difference 
between the mental characteristics of the two 
sexes, for example : the hen is very peaceable, 
chanticleer very irascible ; the hen is an indus- 
trious scratcher, while chanticleer is naturally 
an idler, and thinks that if he crows and fights, 
that is enough ; the hen takes care of the 
chicks all day, chanticleer only occasionally 
giving them a bug, and oftener a dig ; the hen 
takes care of them all night also, chanticleer 
elbowing them off the perch to get the best 
place for himself ; the hen, having seized an- 
other hen about the head, never lets go till 
the feathers come out, and never stops fighting 
till nearly dead, while chanticleer fights only 
for glory, and gives up long before he is hurt 
much ; when they are fed, the hen attends 
strictly to business and gets all she can, while 
chanticleer will pick up a morsel, and wave it 
up and down with frantic eagerness to be seen 
of the hen, and values the flattery of having 
her take it from him more than the food. 



52 Nature 

These, so far, are well-known observations ; 
but I wish to put on record one that is per- 
haps new, and, if new, important to the scien- 
tific world. It has been commonly supposed 
by evolutionists that the development of altru- 
ism and the benevolent sentiments in the lower 
animals reaches no farther than to the parental 
and sex points of view. But I have seen one 
of my roosters call his fellow and feed a bug to 
him. It may have been a bug that he did not 
specially want, himself, but this would only be 
a counterpart of much of our higher human 
benevolence. Does not most of our charity 
consist in giving away something for which we 
have no earthly use ourselves ? (By the way, 
I have known this altruistic rooster to crow 
with great pride and pleasure when the object 
of his alms-giving had humbly swallowed the 
scratchy morsel.) I have seen a mother hen, 
also, when another brood of little chicks had 
got mixed up with her own for the moment, 
making a great pretense of pecking the aliens 
on the head, to teach them the difference be- 
tween families in this world, but taking great 
pains not to hurt the fluffy little strangers. 
Furthermore, I have noticed that certain other 
hens, not mothers (but whether any who have 
never been mothers I have not yet observed), 
will peck all little chicks with self-restraint, 



Human Nature in Chickens 53 

giving them as much salutary discipline as pos- 
sible without bodily harm. 

It may be said that these phenomena occur 
only among domestic animals, who have caught 
some morals and manners from their betters 
by contagion. But I think this is a subtlety, 
and that we may as well admit that the devel- 
opment of the moral sentiments begins farther 
back than we have been inclined to put it. 



A NEW EARTH IN THE OLD EARTH'S 
ARMS 

I HAVE made the discovery of new heavens 
and a new earth. Who has not felt the need 
of them ? Who has not said to himself, *' I 
have seen this whole thing over and over 
again. This world, which is * round like an 
orange,' has, like an orange, now been effectu- 
ally squeezed. Give me new worlds, not to 
conquer, but to live in." When the impulse 
to turn over a new leaf, to break with the past, 
to begin life all over again, is strong upon us, 
we look around in vain for " fresh woods and 
pastures new " in which to begin it. How put 
a new soul of existence into an old body of 
circumstances ? But we are no longer driven 
to this dilemma. I do not mind making pub- 
lic, at least to all those choice spirits who read 
a Certain Magazine, the chart of my newly dis- 
covered world. 

It is the world of the dawn. "Oh, that P' 
cries my young friend scornfully, and is about 
to turn away. But let me ask you, in confi- 
dence, When have you seen the dawn, the 



A New Earth in the Old Earth's Arms 5 5 

whole of it, from silvery beginning to golden 
end ? It was not long ago that an ingenuous 
maid asked me, looking up from her favorite 
poet, " Is the sunrise so much, any way ? " 
No, I might have said ; not if you burst in on 
it rudely, jumping out of bed, or sleepily fum- 
bling aside a curtain. You only get, in that 
case, the flash of an angry glare. But go 
quietly at very daybreak, steal to some rock, 
or hill, or only to some housetop, and lie in 
wait for its delicate first footsteps in the east- 
ern sky. You must stalk your sunrise. 

How often do we hear somebody say, " I had 
to get up early this morning, and I wondered 
why we don't always do it " ! But the chances 
are it was a very inadequate experience. There 
was some invalid to be tended, or some owl- 
train to be caught. Taken deliberately, and 
provided for beforehand by a full night's sleep, 
the wonder why we do not always do it would 
be vastly increased. Why we do not, how- 
ever, is plain enough. It is because we can- 
not afford to burn our candle at both ends. 
^' Early to bed aiid early to rise," the whole 
prescription reads. It does not do to take 
half of it alone. If we are to see the mornins:- 
star properly, the evening-star must draw on 
our night-cap with its own. 

The dawn, then, is protected from the throng 



56 Nature 

of sacrilegious sight-seers by a great barrier. 
That barrier is the difficulty of going to bed. 
Our civilization has become a gaslight civiliza- 
tion. We try to turn night into day, and only 
succeed in turning night wrong side out; get- 
ting the harsh and wiry side that rasps the 
jaded nerves, in place of the gentle touches of 
" the welcome, the thrice prayed for " mantle 
of peaceful dreams. 

It is diverting, to say the least, to take now 
and then a point of view outside of all our 
most cherished customs, even those that seem 
to us most "natural," because our patient na- 
tures have been so completely twisted into 
them, as the jar to the jar-bred Chinese dwarf. 
Casting such a glance from outside at our gas- 
light habits, we suddenly see something absurd 
in them. Standing in a crowded and bril- 
liantly glaring room, half deafened by the hor- 
rid discord of a hundred jabbering tongues, 
we find it a relic of barbarism. We see the 
dancing rings of savages, yelling and beating 
tom-toms around a blazing fire. How much 
better off all these people would be, we think 
(supposing the din and confusion permit us to 
hear ourselves think), if they were all comfort- 
ably in bed, preparing their nervous machinery 
for a sane and energetic day to-morrow ! For 
my part, I should be glad if I could go back 



A New Earth in the Old Earth's Arms 57 

and cut away from my life all that ever oc- 
curred in it beyond early bedtime, as the cook 
goes round a pie-plate and shears off the out- 
lying dough. Mere ragged and formless shreds 
of existence those gaslight hours have been, 
containing, on the whole, far more evil than 
good ; far more yawns, and the dreadful pangs 
of yawns suppressed, than refreshing eye-beams 
and voices. 

Then there is another thing : could not the 
act of going to bed be made, from childhood 
up, a less depressing operation ? The one daily 
torture of my own otherwise kindly handled 
childhood was the going to bed in the dark. 
I hated the dark, and have always hated it. 
Why could not some softly shaded light have 
been left for me to go to sleep by, and then 
withdrawn, instead of crashing down on my 
vi^ide-awake eyes that horrible club of black- 
ness ? Or how much better to have " cuddled 
doon " in the still faintly glimmering twilight, 
and let the slowly coming starlight draw the 
child to sleepiness, and softly " kiss his eyehds 
down " ! 

And why must one assume a garb for the 
night that even the child feels to be ridicu- 
lously unsuitable ? To take off one's warm 
and comfortably fitting garments, and barely 
cover the shrinking pudency of the limbs with 



58 Nature 

some brief apology of flapping inadequateness, 

— it is an insult to the Angel of Sleep. They 
do this better, I am told, in Japan. There the 
man has a night-suit of entire and comely gar- 
ments. He does not unclothe and then half 
clothe himself, and sneak in mortified helpless- 
ness underneath a weight of vein-compressing 
sheets and blankets and uncomfortable " com- 
fortables," squeezing him out as if he had 
covered himself with the cellar-door. He lies 
down in his complete warm suit, and throws 
over him some light affair of gossamer silk. It 
only needs a sudden cry of "fire" in the house 
to make us realize the preposterous condition 
we are every one of us in. 

The time of Going to Bed ought in some 
way to be made the pleasantest, and most de- 
corous, and most dignified, even — if you like 

— the most picturesque, and certainly the most 
comfortable hour of the whole twenty-four. 
Then it would need no polite euphemism of 
" retiring " to veil its horrors. Then the child 
would no longer hold back from it, as if he 
were being thrust into a hideous cave of dark- 
ness, to be seized by all the nightmares of 
Dreamdom. 

And then, best of all, we should be ready to 
rise at the whistle of the first chirping bird, 
perfectly rested, thoroughly refreshed, with the 



A New Earth in the Old Earth's Arms 59 

brain vocal only with light echoes of the whole- 
some day before, instead of still jangling with 
the cultured rumpus of a " social evening," or 
an " evening of amusement," or the uncanny, 
fevered visions which are only such evenings 
gone to seed. We should see the heavens at 
their purest, on earth peace, the big white 
stars at their best, unconfused by the haze of 
smaller stars and star-dust, and shining alone 
in the faintly illumined sky. We should know 
how our earth and its robe of ambient air ap- 
pear to other planets, — a morning-star to the 
morning-stars. For the whole east, as it pales 
the planets in its growing light, is itself of pure 
and starry brightness. But if I am going to 
write of the dawn, I may as well do it in verse, 
and have done with it : — 

AT EARLY MORN 

Walk who will at deep of noon, 
Or stroll fantastic in the moon ; 
I would take the morning earth, 
New as at creation's birth, 
Air unbreathed, and grass untrod ; 
"Where I cross the dawn-lit sod,- 
Making green paths in the gray 
Of the dew that 's brushed away. 

Would some depth of holy night, 
Sacred with its starry light, 



60 Nature 

Over all my breast might roll, 
Bringing dawn unto my soul, 
That its consecrated dew 
Might refresh and make me new ! 
Then that thou and I might pace 
Some far planet, poised in space, 
Fresh as children innocent, 
In each other's love content ! 
There our feet should recommence, 
Lightened of experience, 
Morning ways on dewy slope, 
Winged with wonder and with hope ; 
All the things we 'd thought, or done. 
Or felt before, forgot — save one ! 




literature ana Criticijsm 

SHAKESPEARE'S PROSE 

UT did Shakespeare write any prose ? 
the ingenuous reader may inquire. 
Indeed he did, a good deal of it. We 
always think of him, to be sure, as a poet. In 
fact, hardly any other name in literature seems 
so far removed from any association with prose 
as this of the world's greatest dramatist. His 
plays, however, constantly show that he was a 
master not of verse only. "The Merry Wives 
of Windsor " is, with trifling exceptions, writ- 
ten in prose ; so is nearly the whole of " Much 
Ado About Nothing." Not only in the lighter 
plays, but in the tragedies, also, a considerable 
amount of prose exists. For instance, about 
half of "Henry IV., Part I.," is prose, and 
about a quarter of " Hamlet." This feature of 
Shakespeare's writings has been generally over- 
looked. For many reasons it is well worth 
careful study. But first a preliminary word as 
to his verse. 

Except for scattered bits of lyrical verse in 



62 Literature and Criticism 

light rhyming measures, the metre of Shake- 
speare's dramas, wherever he employs metre, 
is what is commonly known as "blank verse." 
This, to speak technically, is iambic pentameter 
without rhyme. That is to say, each line con- 
sists of five feet, each foot being an iambus ; 
that is, an accented syllable following an unac- 
cented one. Any other metre might be used 
without rhyme, and be properly called blank 
(for example, " Hiawatha " is written in blank 
trochaic tetrameter, " Evangeline " in blank 
hexameter) ; but the blank iambic pentameter 
has proved so much more serviceable in Eng- 
lish verse than any other, as to have appropri- 
ated to itself the name of " blank verse." 

This measure, though it is so familiar to us 
at the present day, as the form in which we 
have read Shakespeare and Milton and Words- 
worth and the " Idylls of the King " (as well as, 
unfortunately, much of the feeblest verse ex- 
tant, since so many pens have a fearful facility 
in producing it), was an unpopular innovation 
in Shakespeare's early days. Until about the 
year 1590, when " Marlowe's mighty line " first 
resounded in " Tamberlaine," the drama (so 
far as it existed at all) was confined to prose 
or to rhymed measures. Blank verse had been 
introduced into England by Surrey's transla- 
tion of the ^neid half a century before, and 



Shakespeare's Prose 63 

Sackville had made the first experiment of its 
fitness for the drama in his tragedy of " Gor- 
boduc," produced in 1561 ; but in his hands it 
was stiff and unwieldy. Marlowe's manage- 
ment of it was easier and more powerful ; but 
Shakespeare was the first to develop the real 
capabilities of its majestic rhythm. 

Not only was Shakespeare the first to use 
with complete success the much abused " blank 
iambics," but he was the first (and the last) to 
mingle with masterful skill his verse with prose. 
Ben Jonson, as well as Beaumont and Fletcher, 
wrote some of their dramas in verse and some 
in prose, and occasionally made use of both in 
the same play, but never mingled the two 
throughout, as did Shakespeare, with exqui- 
sitely perfect art. It is to this prose that the 
reader's attention is invited, with the special 
view of asking and making some suggestions 
toward answering the question, Why did Shake- 
speare use prose, in the passages where he did 
so, instead of verse ? 

We maybe sure that the master poet did not 
write prose at certain times by accident, or 
because he was tired of rhythm, or because it 
was the easiest way. His choice was certainly 
in every case deliberate, or (what comes to the 
same thing) was based on an instinctive sense 
of certain underlying laws of expression. When 



64 Literature and Criticism 

he wrote verse it was because prose, in that 
particular place, would not serve his turn ; and 
when he changed from verse, as he so con- 
tinually did, to prose, it was from his sense of a 
similar limitation in the capabilities of rhythm. 

A complete answer to our inquiry, then, 
would at the same time go far toward answer- 
ing the deeper question as to the respective 
possibilities of prose and verse as forms of 
human . expression. Perhaps, indeed, there 
could be no better way of investigating that 
great problem of literary art than by searching 
for the principles which guided this master 
artist in his choice of these two forms of ex- 
pression, both of which he used so perfectly, 
changing from one to the other as constantly 
and easily as the sea-bird from its home in the 
air to its home on the wave. 

Let us look at the prose of " Hamlet," as 
being, perhaps (thanks especially to Mr. Mc- 
Cullough), as familiar as any to most readers, 
and as furnishing examples of all that is best 
in Shakespeare. The first departure from the 
blank verse occurs in Act II., Scene 2, where 
Polonius reads Hamlet's letters : — 

Pol. [Reads] " To the celestial and my soul's idol, the 
most beautified Ophelia," — That 's an ill phrase, a vile 
phrase ; beautified is a vile phrase : but you shall hear. 

It is noteworthy that in Shakespeare letters 



Shakespeare's Prose 65 

are thrown into the form of prose. The pur- 
pose seems to be to indicate that they are 
brought in from without. The natural speech 
of the dialogue being blank verse, anything 
which breaks in on it from outside must be 
either in some different metre or in prose. In 
certain cases, as in the play within the play, 
in " Hamlet," the former device is chosen -, 
in the case of letters, the latter. In the play 
within the play, the effect of a more artificial 
form of verse with rhymes is to throw the 
action one step farther back, away from the 
actual life of the spectator. In letters, on the 
contrary, the effect of the prose, breaking in on 
the blank verse, is usually to bring before us 
the world of real life and affairs, if not outside 
of the play, at least outside of the present 
scene. -^ 

Shortly after the reading of the letter (the 
dialogue, meanwhile, proceeding in verse), 
Hamlet enters, reading. Being " boarded " 
by Polonius, he at once begins answering him 
in prose, affecting madness, though with 
"method in it." 

Pol. Away, I do beseech you, both away : 

1 For a notable instance of Shakespeare's power to 
shift the spectator's point of view and wholly change 
his atmosphere, see the essay of De Quincey upon " The 
Knocking at the Gate," in Macbeth. 



(^ Literature and Criticism 

I '11 board him presently. 

\Exeunt Kiitg, Queen, and Attendants, 
O, give me leave. 
How does my good Lord Hamlet .? 

Ham. Well, God-a-mercy. 

Pol. Do you know me, my lord ? 

Ham. Excellent well ; you 're a fishmonger. 

Pol. Not I, my lord. 

Ham. Then I would you were so honest a man. 

Pol. Honest, my lord ? 

Ham. Ay, sir ; to be honest, as this world goes, is to 
be one man picked out of ten thousand. 

Pol. . . . My honourable lord, I will most humbly take 
my leave of you. 

Ha?n. You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I 
will more willingly part withal — [Aside] except my 
life, except my life, except my life. 

This scene is written in prose evidently for 
the reason that there is no earnest feeling in 
it. As for Polonius, he is " going about to 
recover the wind " of the prince ; and Ham- 
let himself has " put an antic disposition on," 
as he warned his friends that he would some- 
times do. 

The essential function of poetry is to express 
feeling. A scene, then, which is only an intel- 
lectual sparring match between a would-be 
courtier and an assumed madman, could find 
no fitting expression in verse. 

Moreover, verse is by its very structure or- 



Shakespeare's Prose 67 

derly and regulated. Its rhythm consists in a 
constant subjection to a ruling law. Accord- 
ingly it is the natural expression for that feel- 
ing only which is under the control of reason. 
Madness of every form must necessarily break 
through its laws into irregular prose. Hence 
Hamlet, when speaking in his character of a 
madman, always uses prose. So does the really 
mad Ophelia, except when her utter lunacy 
goes beyond prose into incoherent snatches of 
fantastic song. So does King Lear when mad, 
except where the coherence and earnestness of 
his thoughts bring them for the moment into 
verse. So does Edgar, when affecting mad- 
ness. 

At the end of the scene quoted above, in the 
midst of his last reply to Polonius, Hamlet 
suddenly turns away and utters to himself his 
own sad thought, which clothes itself in rhythm 
(though the words are always printed in the 
form of prose), thus : — 

" except my life, except my life, except my life." 

Then enter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 
With them, too, Hamlet speaks in prose. He 
does not affect madness, as with Polonius, but 
he is suspicious of them, and so gives them 
none of his sincere thoughts, holding them at 
arm's length in his bantering prose. Midway 



6S Literature and Criticism 

in the conversation, Hamlet betrays them into 
confessing that they were sent for by the King. 

Ham. [Aside.] Nay, then, I have an eye of you. — If 
you love me, hold not off. 

Gml. My lord, we were sent for. 

J7am. I will tell you why ; so shall my anticipation 
prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the King 
and Queen moult no feather. I have of late (but where- 
fore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom 
of exercises ; and indeed it goes so heavily with my 
disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to 
me a sterile promontory ; this most excellent canopy, the 
air, look you — this brave, o'erhanging firmament, this 
majestical roof fretted with golden fire — why, it ap- 
pears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent con- 
gregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man ! 
how noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form 
and moving how express and admirable ! in action how 
like an angel ! in apprehension how like a god ! the 
beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! And yet, 
to me, what is this quintessence of dust ? Man delights 
not me ; no, nor woman, neither, though by your smiling 
you seem to say so. 

This passage is always quoted as if it were 
one of Hamlet's sincere and earnest utterances. 
It would not have been spoken in prose if it 
were so. When he says " I have of late (but 
wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth," etc., 
he is by no means speaking from his heart. In 
reality, he knows very well " wherefore." These, 
remember, are the false friends of whom he 



Shakespeare's Prose 69 

afterward says (speaking now sincerely in 
verse) : — 

..." my two school-fellows. 
Whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd." 

He is putting them off their guard as spies 
by attributing his mood to such melancholy as 
any man might be liable to, when for the time 
he is " sick of life, love, all things," or when, in 
other words, he has an ordinary attack of " the 
blues." It is not such friends as these that he 
will suffer to look into his very soul, and so, in 
prose, he parries their advances. 

His mockery of Polonius by the same test is 
only put on to serve his purpose. It is notice- 
able that he will not have him mocked by oth- 
ers, for he says to the players as they are 
going out together (and his words by their 
earnestness fall out of the prose in the midst 
of which they occur into metre) : — 

"Follow that lord, and look you mock him not." 

At the end of the scene Hamlet dismisses 
his two school-fellows, still in prose. As soon 
as they are gone, however, and he is once more 
alone, dropping the twofold mask of jesting 
madness (worn before Polonius) and causeless 
depression (before Rosencrantz and Guilden- 
stern) he communes with his own heart in sor- 
rowful verse : — 



70 Literature and Criticism 

Ham. . . . My good friends, I '11 leave you till night: 
you are welcome to Elsinore. 
J^os. Good my lord ! 
//am. Ay, so, God b' wi' ye. [Exeunt Ros. and Guild. 

Now I am alone. 
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I ! 
Is it not monstrous, that this player here. 
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, 
Could force his soul so to his own conceit, 
That from her working all his visage wann'd ; 
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect, 
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting 
With forms to his conceit ? and all for nothing I 
For Hecuba ! 

What 's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, 
That he should weep for her ? What would he do, 
Had he the motive and the cue for passion 
That I have ? . . . 
. . . The spirit that I have seen 
May be the Devil : and the Devil hath power 
T' assume a pleasing shape ; yea, and perhaps, 
Out of my weakness and my melancholy, 
As he is very potent with such spirits. 
Abuses me to damn me : I '11 have grounds 
More relative than this : the play 's the thing 
Wherein I '11 catch the conscience of the King. \^Exit, 

The last lines of the soliloquy are quoted 
to illustrate the habit of closing a passage of 
blank verse with rhyme. For this there is a 
good reason. It is because the rhythm of the 
verse finds some difficulty in stopping. Its 
very movement suggests continuance. Its 
stately flow^ free from rhyme, can scarcely 



Shakespeare's Prose 71 

come to a full close, any more than a wave, 
rolling in from ocean, could pause in full ca- 
reer. It must break in order to stop, either 
by a hemistich (or half-line), which is abrupt at 
the best, as if the wave shattered against a 
rock ; or by a smooth rhyme, which is like the 
wave's slipping up the beach in spent ripples. 

The next prose passage in " Hamlet " is the 
nunnery scene. It is just after the great soHl- 
oquy, " To be, or not to be," etc., which ends 
thus : — 

Ham. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all ; 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; 
And enterprises of great pith and moment 
With this regard their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now ! 
The fair Ophelia ! Nymph, in thy orisons 
Be all my sins remembered. 

Oph. Good my lord, 

How does your honour this many a day ? 

Ham. I humbly thank you ; well, well, well. 

Oph. My lord, I have remembrances of yours, 
That I have longed long to re-deliver ; 
I pray you, now receive them. 

Ham. No, not I ; 

I never gave you aught. 

Oph. My honour'd lord, you know right well you did; 
And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed, 
As made the things more rich ; their perfume lost. 
Take these again ; for to the noble mind 
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. 
There, my lord. 



72 Literature and Criticism 

Ham. Ha, ha ! Are you honest ? 

Oph. My lord ? 

Ham. Are you fan-? 

Oph. What means your lordship ? 

Ham. That, if you be honest and fair, your honesty 
should admit no discourse to your beauty. ... I did 
love you once. 

Oph. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. 

Hai7i. You should not have believed me : for virtue 
cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of 
it : I loved you not. 

Oph. I was the more deceived. 

Ham. Get thee to a nunnery : why wouldst thou be a 
breeder of sinners .? I am myself indifferent honest ; 
but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were 
better my mother had not borne me. 

In this scene, whether because he suspects 
that the King and Queen are listening, or for 
some other reason, Hamlet rails at Ophelia in 
a coarse, hard fashion. He has on his mask 
of madness, and whatever comes through that 
must be spoken in prose. Observe, however, 
that his first utterances to her, being sincere, 
are rhythmical : — 

" The fair Ophelia ! Nymph, in thy orisons 
Be all my sins remembered." 

And 

" I humbly thank you ; well, well, well." 

This last is a complete pentameter line, pro- 
vided we allow the pause between the last 
words, each to take one beat of the rhythm (a 



Shakespeare's Prose 73 

device which is often to be found in Shake- 
speare. For instance, in the line quoted above, 
beginning, " For Hecuba ! " the natural pause 
after the exclamation fills out the line). That 
is to say, wherever the real heart of Hamlet 
speaks to her, or of her (as in the scene at the 
grave), it expresses itself in rhythm : wherever 
he speaks through the mask of madness, his 
words are prose. 

Scene 2 opens with Hamlet's instructions to 
the players : — 

" Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to 
you, trippingly on the tongue ; but if you mouth it, as 
many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier 
spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with 
your hand, thus, but use all gently," etc. 

This is in the prose form because it is prac- 
tical, business-like, professional advice. It is 
not the real Hamlet — the Prince of Denmark 
— that speaks it ; or, if it be, it is not from 
the storm-brooding deeps of his breast that it 
comes, but from the surface of his mind. 

When the players have gone out, and he has 
sent away the others, he calls to him his true 
friend, Horatio. With him, as before, he im- 
mediately begins to speak in verse, for now 
the real Hamlet is uttering the sincerity of his 
soul. 

Then follows the scene of the poisoning 



74 Literature and Criticism 

play. Twice only, during this, does Hamlet 
drop his mask and speak in rhythm. Both in- 
stances are spoken aside to Ophelia, and both 
are but fragments of lines. The first is after 
the prologue has been recited : — 

Oph. 'T is brief, my lord. 
Ham. As woman's love. 

The second is where the play-queen makes 
a vow never, once a widow, to be a wife : — 

Ham. [To Ophelid\ If she should break it now "i 

After the King has broken off the play and 
Hamlet is left alone with Horatio, it might be 
expected that he would express his exultation 
to his friend in verse. But it is like a real 
madman that he now speaks. Half frenzied 
with excitement by the suspense, and then by 
the success of his plot, he breaks out into 
hysterical gayety, in scraps of rhyme, mingled 
with disjointed prose. Just so, afterward, does 
the crazed Ophelia. 

Then with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he 
talks again, at first bantering, then sharply re- 
proving them ; but both moods are of the cool 
mind, not of the earnest heart, and are there- 
fore expressed in prose : — 

Re-enter Players with recorders. 
Ham. O, the recorders ! let me see one. To with- 



Shakespeare's Prose 75 

draw with you : — why do you go about to recover the 
wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil ? 

Guil. O, my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is 
too unmannerly. 

Ham, I do not well understand that. Will you play 
upon this pipe } 

Giiil. My lord, I cannot. 

Ham. I pray you. 

Guil. Believe me, I cannot. 

Ham. I do beseech you. 

Guil. I know no touch of it, my lord. 

Ham. 'Tis as easy as lying; govern these ventages 
with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your 
mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look 
you, these are the stops. 

Guil. But these cannot I command to any utterance 
of harmony ; I have not the skill. 

Ham. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you 
make of me ! You would play upon me ; you would 
seem to know my stops ; you would pluck out the heart 
of my mystery ; you would sound me from my lowest 
note to the top of my compass : and there is much mu- 
sic, excellent voice, in this little organ ; yet cannot you 
make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be 
played on than a pipe ? Call me what instrument you 
will, though you can fret me, yet you pannot play upon 
me. 

When Polonius comes in to summon him to 
the Queen, Hamlet " plays upon " him in this 
wise : — 

Ham. Do you see yonder cloud that 's almost in shape 
of a camel ? 

Pol. By the mass, and it 's like a camel, indeed. 



16 Literature and Criticism 

Ham. Methinks it is like a weasel. 

Pol. It is backed like a weasel. 

Ham. Or like a whale ? 

Pol. Very like a whale. 

Ham. Then I will come to my mother by and by. 
[Aside] They fool me to the top of my bent. I will 
come by and by. 

But, in every other case, when he has said, 
" Leave me, friends," and he is left alone, his 
own thought expresses itself in rhythm. 

There is no more prose till Scene 3 of Act 
IV. Here, in his character of madman, he 
speaks concerning the body of Polonius, whom 
he has slain by mistake for the King. So in 
the next scene : — 

JTzng-. Now, Hamlet, where 's Polonius } 
Ham. At supper. 
J^ing. At supper ! Where ? 

Ham. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten : a 
certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. 

King. Where is Polonius ? 

Ham. In heaven ; send thither to see : if your messen- 
ger find him not there, seek him i' the other place your- 
self. But indeed, if you find him not within this month, 
you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby. 

King. Go seek him there. ]_To some Attendants. 

Ham. He will stay till ye come. 

In Act IV., Scene 5, occurs the most piteous 
passage in all Shakespeare, that of Ophelia's 
madness ; yet it is in prose : — 



Shakespeare's Prose 77 

Queen. Nay, but, Ophelia, — 
Oph. Pray you, mark. 
\_Sings\ White his shroud as the mountain snow, — ; 
Queett. Alas, look here, my lord. 
Oph. [Smgs] Larded with sweet flowers ; 
"Which bewept to the grave did go 
With true-love showers. 
Kmg. How do you, pretty lady ? 
Oph. Well, God 'ild you ! They say the owl was 
a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but 
know not what we may be. God be at your table ! 
King. Conceit upon her father. 

Oph. Pray you, let 's have no words of this ; but 
when they ask you what it means, say you this : 
\Sings\ To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day. 
All in the morning betime, 
And I a maid at your window, 
To be your Valentine. 

King. How long hath she been thus } 

Oph. I hope all will be well. We must be patient : 
but I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay 
him i' the cold ground. My brother shall know of it : 
and so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my 
coach ! Good-night, ladies ; — good-night, sweet ladies ; 
good-night, good-night. 

In such scenes as this there is no place for 
the steady beat of verse, the essential nature 
of which is regulated and orderly rhythm, 
whereas the very characteristic of the crazed 
brain is its unregulated, disjointed action — 
" like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and 
harsh." Chaotic scraps of prose, obeying no 



7S Literature and Criticism 

order but a haphazard surface association, 
must now be its mode of expression. The bits 
of lyrical verse, breaking in at random with 
their mock suggestion of light-hearted gayety, 
still further deepen the effect by most pathetic 
contrast. 

Act V. opens with the churchyard scene, and 
the making ready of Ophelia's grave : — 

Enter two Clowns, with spades and pickaxes. 

2 Clo. Will you ha' the truth on 't ? If this had not 
been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out 
o' Christian burial. 

1 Clo. Why, there thou say'st : and the more pity that 
great folk should have countenance in this world to 
drown or hang themselves, more than their even Chris- 
tian. Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen 
but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers : they hold up 
Adam's profession. 

2 Clo. Was he a gentleman .? 

1 Clo. He was the first that ever bore arms. 

2 Clo. Why, he had none. 

1 Clo. What, art a heathen ? How dost thou under- 
stand the Scripture .? The Scripture says " Adam 
digged : " could he dig without arms .■* I '11 put an- 
other question to thee : if thou answerest me not to 
the purpose, confess thyself — 

2 Clo. Go to. 

1 Clo. What is he that builds stronger than either the 
mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter ? 

2 Clo. The gallows-maker ; for that frame outlives a 
thousand tenants. 

I Clo. I like thy wit well, in good faith ; the gallows 



Shakespeare's Prose 79 

does well ; but how does it well ? it does well to those 
that do ill : now thou dost ill to say the gallows is built 
stronger than the church : argal, the gallows may do 
well to thee. To 't again, come. 

2 Clo. " Who builds stronger than a mason, a ship- 
wright, or a carpenter ? " 

1 Clo. Ay, tell me that, and unyoke. 

2 Clo. Marry, now I can tell. 

1 Clo. To 't. 

2 Clo. Mass, I cannot tell. 

Enter Hamlet and Horatio, at a distance. 
I Clo. Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your 
dull ass will not mend his pace with beating ; and when 
you are asked this question next, say a " grave-maker : " 
the houses that he makes last till doomsday. . . . 

\_Digs and sings. 

[ Throws tip another skull. 
Ham. There 's another ; why may not that be the 
skull of a lawyer t Where be his quiddities now, his quil- 
lets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks t why does 
he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the 
sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his 
action of battery > Humph ! This fellow might be in 's 
time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recog- 
nizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries ; 
is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his re- 
coveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt ? . . . The 
very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box ; 
and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha ? 

But soft ! but soft ! aside : here comes the King. 



80 Literature and Criticism 

E lifer Vx'iests, etc., in procession ; the Corpse ^Ophelia, 
Laertes and Mourners following ; King, Queen, 
their trains, etc. 

The Queen, the courtiers : who is that they follow ? 

And with such maimed rites ? This doth betoken 

The corse they follow did with desperate hand 

Fordo it own life. 

And thus the scene goes on in solemn verse. 

It is easy here to see why the grave-diggers 
talk in prose. Their absurd burlesque of logic 
and wit is almost as far removed from the 
sphere of ordinary verse as lunacy would be. 
But why does Hamlet use prose ? One reason 
may be that what he says is thrown into the 
midst of a scene which is already going on in 
prose. At least it is very likely that a part of 
what he says, if occurring in a versified scene, 
would have taken on the prevailing form of 
rhythm. Yet Shakespeare does not hesitate 
to change the form, even several times in the 
midst of a scene, where the different moods 
seem to require it. The real reason for Ham- 
let's prose here is, I believe, that it is his mind 
that is speaking, not his heart. There is no 
deep feeling or earnestness of purpose in what 
he says. It is rather the idle, speculative, half- 
humorous play of a mind that is merely wait- 
ing between more important events. Not until 
the stately funeral procession comes suddenly 



Shakespeare's Prose 81 

in sight, solemnly moving toward Ophelia's 
grave, does he rouse himself from this transient 
mood, and the deep current of his real thought 
and feeling set forward again. Then he imme- 
diately begins, as we have seen above, to speak 
in verse. 

But the end of the play draws on apace. 
The mood deepens more and more. There is 
no longer any prose, or any room for prose, 
with one exception. In the middle of Scene 2 
of the last act, Osric enters, and, in order to 
bring himself to the level of this pert coxcomb, 
Hamlet drops from the sad and stately rhythm 
of his thought once more and for the last time. 

Brought into this lighter mood by the pre- 
sence of Osric, he continues in it for a moment 
after his exit, and goes on speaking in prose to 
Horatio : — 

Uor. You will lose this wager, my lord. 

Ham. I do not think so; since he went into France, 
I have been in continual practice; I shall win at the 
odds. 

So much of his reply is in prose, because he 
is speaking merely his surface thought about 
the wager. But in the midst of his answer his 
voice falls into rhythmical flow; the heart is 
speaking now. " Sea was it, yet working after 
storm," and its waves beat on in measured rise 
and fall : — 



82 Literature and Criticism 

" But thou wouldst 
Not think how ill all 's here about my heart." 

Then stopping abruptly, he breaks the rhythm 
with a phrase in prose, just as the idea breaks 
the flow of his feeling : — 

But it is no matter. 
I/br. Nay, good my lord, — 

Then Hamlet replies, trying to turn it lightly, 
and so not allowing his words to be rhythmical 
and earnest : — 

It is but foolery ; but it is such a kind of gain-giving 
as would perhaps trouble a woman. 

Hor. If your mind dislike anything, obey it : I will 
forestall their repair hither, and say you are not fit. 

Ham. Not a whit ; we defy augury : there 's a special 
providence in the fall of a sparrow. 

Then his words fall into verse again, as the 
feeling deepens in the shadowy presage of 
death : — 

If it be now, 't is not to come ; if it 

Be not to come, it will be now ; if it 

Be not now, yet it will come : the readiness 

Is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, 

What is 't to leave betimes ? 

This last passage is always printed in the 
form of prose. I have given it as above, to 
show how rhythmical it is. In the third line 
from the end if "it will" be read "'twill," 
and in the next line " man has " be read 



Shakespeare's Prose 83 

" man 's," the passage makes perfect metre. 
The lines might be broken differently, as fol- 
lows : — 

If it be now, 't is not to come ; 

If it be not to come, it will be now ; 

If it be not now ( — ), yet it will come : 

The readiness is all. Since no man (ha)s aught 

Of what he leaves, what is 't to leave betimes ? 

There is no further prose in " Hamlet." Sad 
and strong, the current of the verse flows on to 
the close. 

Let us, in conclusion, gather up some of the 
points which such a study gives us. Verse dif- 
fers from prose in being, in the broadest sense 
of the word, musical or harmonious. It is 
therefore the natural form of expression for 
emotion. Wherever a scene is occupied with 
mere ideas, it is in prose, changing to verse, 
if at all, where the ideas merge into feelings. 
On the other hand, any entire play or any de- 
tached scene which is full of intense feeling is 
in verse, changing to prose only where emo- 
tions give way to ideas, whether logical, practi- 
cal, or jocular. Again, verse, and especially 
so-called blank verse, is essentially orderly 
and coherent. It is therefore fitted to express 
only emotion which is under the control of 
the reason. Whenever it passes beyond, into 
frenzy or madness, it must cease to express it- 



84 Literature and Criticism 

self in regular verse, just as music has no voice 
for passion that has broken its banks and be- 
come a destroying deluge. That can only find 
(or fail in seeking to find) utterance in unmu- 
sical wailing or screams. Rhythmical harmony 
of any high sort, whether that of Beethoven or 
that of Shakespeare, is majestic and noble, like 
the orderly sweep of planets in their spheres, 
" still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim." It 
can only well express, therefore, feeling that is 
noble, or that, at least, through its power, has 
some element of nobility, or thought that is 
deep and strong enough to carry feeling with 
it. Clowns and jesters and drunken men and 
the trivial business of every-day life get ex- 
pressed in prose. So does wit, however refined. 
So does pleasure, unless it be the deep joy of 
love or death, that lies so close to pain. 

Doubtless prose scenes are often thrown into 
the drama for the sake of relieving the strain 
on the feelings which the tragical action or 
passion has caused. The capacity for deep 
feeling must be renewed at intervals by breath- 
ing spaces of a hghter tone. But the nature 
of the scene is what is chosen for this purpose, 
not the prose or verse form of its expression ; 
this is always self-determined and never open 
to choice. 

Shakespeare's prose is wonderfully natural. 



Shakespeare's Prose 85 

Though written for the stage, it seems real life ; 
not like the modern novelist's real-life prose, 
which always seems written for the stage. 
What novels he would have written, with what 
delicious subtlety of humor, with what shrewd 
insight of observation he would have portrayed 
the lower world of ideas and characteristics, 
had he not chosen to depict that higher world 
of passion and character. His prose would 
have given us, beyond any of the novelists or 
historians, charming pictures of what men think 
and do ; but it is fortunate for us that he chose 
rather to give us in verse, beyond any of the 
other poets, the perfect expression of what men 
feel and are. 



AN IMPRESSION OF BALZAC 

When a man comes into the world endowed 
with vigorous perception, a retentive memory, 
and that species of imagination which is only a 
potpourri of memories, made grotesque and 
fantastic by their incongruous intermixture, it 
is a matter of the merest accident what he will 
write ; or whether he will write on paper, or on 
canvas with a brush. Dickens might have been 
Dore, and Dord Dickens. It is even true of 
the greatest artists to a certain extent. Michael 
Angelo " relished versing ; " Dante was inter- 
rupted at the easel by his " persons of impor- 
tance;" Milton might never have returned to 
poetry but for the failure of the Good Old 
Cause; and Shakespeare would have written 
great novels if any such invention had been 
known in his day. When a powerfully en- 
dowed man, such as Balzac certainly was, with 
all his limitations, does chance to spend a life- 
time in writing fiction, and, moreover, without 
the accident of any immediate popularity of 
one volume or another to determine the par- 
ticular form or quality of his work, so that he 



An Impression of Balzac 8y 

continues to pour out a flood of all manner of 
fiction, — good, bad, and indifferent, clean and 
unclean, romantic and realistic, — it is like char- 
acterizing the surface of the globe to charac- 
terize his productions. His mind was a great 
mirror, — not without its cracks and blurs, — 
and it imaged the whole phantasmagoria of 
superficially seen objects and events. The 
forty volumes of his " Comedie Humaine " he 
well denominates Scenes; they are scenes in 
provincial life, in Parisian life, in military life, 
in political life, — everywhere, except in the 
real and true human life universal. Balzac is 
at the other extreme of evolution from those 
creatures over whose whole surface some dim, 
undifferentiated sense of sight is diffused. In 
him the visual sense has not only become con- 
centrated and distinct, but it has absorbed all 
the other powers. He is all eye. ''^ Penser, 
c'est voir r^ he makes Louis Lambert exclaim. 
The phrase explains all the excellence of Bal- 
zac's method, at the same time that it pro- 
nounces its sentence of final inadequacy. " To 
think " is indeed " to see ; " only there must 
be not only sight, but insight. Merely to 
"watch," 

" When Observation is not sympathy," 
may give apprehension, but not comprehen- 



88 Literature and Criticism 

sion. The great retinas of the ox and owl see, 
and do not see. " Louis Lambert " itself illus- 
trates Balzac's greatness and his weakness. It 
begins as a vivid photograph, and ends in 
grandiloquent fog. His longer stories remind 
one of the advertisement of some modern play 
" in five acts and nineteen tableaux." They are 
all in one act and a thousand tableaux. Some- 
times they show a temporary grasp of true con- 
structive genius, but oftener it is a tedious be- 
wilderment of jostling forms. A rapid survey 
of his works in memory gives us the impression 
of a great theatre seen behind the curtain after 
the ruin and confusion of a partial conflagra- 
tion. A multitude of dramatic " effects " are 
piled together, — shreds of costume, tinsel but 
vividly glittering, broken clumps of highly col- 
ored wooden landscape, comic and tragic ap- 
purtenances, stage swords and stage blood- 
clots, a whole imaginative world gone back to 
chaos, — but nothing consecutive or true to 
reality. 

" Le Pere Goriot " is a novel of caricature. 
Its characters are no more possible than those 
of Dickens, and yet not less probable. No 
mere puppets, constructed by inexperience and 
lack of observation, they all move and speak 
most humanly, for every separate trait is a 
quick transcript of some detached bit of ob- 



An Impression of Balzac 89 

served life. Yet they are not real. It is not 
likely that any one ever finds himself, with 
sudden dismay of conscience, in Balzac's mir- 
ror, as he constantly does in that of Thackeray 
or George Eliot. His characters are full of 
visible human mechanism, but they lack those 
mainsprings of motive such as we find in our- 
selves. " Le Pere Goriot " is a painful story. 
It has that test of a fundamentally worthless 
book, — it leaves a man sadder without leaving 
him wiser. The hero is a vulgar King Lear. 
Feeble-mindedness in him replaces madness, 
and the disagreeable replaces the sublime. 
Balzac is, however, as different from those few 
merely brutal Parisians of to-day who unfortu- 
nately represent French literature to the igno- 
rance of so many Americans, as soul is from 
flesh. He differs from them as being a man of 
intellect. But, like them, he seems to paint 
pain not because he pities it but because he is 
coolly interested in it. The reader sits as at a 
bull-fight or a Christian martyrdom ; and if he 
is entertained, he may as well confess to him- 
self that it is because civilization has not yet 
succeeded in completely extirpating the nerve 
of ferocious enjoyment of pain. The whole- 
souled admirer of Balzac may find the psycho- 
logical explanation of his interest in certain 
passages not far off from that of the audience 



90 Literature and Criticism 

which likes those war lectures and articles best 
that describe the most " mowing down " of 
ranks and general preparation for surgery. It 
is, in either case, a poignant and brutal enjoy- 
ment, however popular an one, and vulgar 
enough, if we venture to subject it to cold 
analysis. 

The " Duchesse de Langeais " is a tedious 
tale, as if told after dinner by a guest who for 
the most part drowses, but occasionally rouses 
himself to startling power. Few things of 
Balzac's illustrate better how his narrative 
facility gets the better of him. It runs on and 
runs on. It is with him as Henry Taylor said 
of Macaulay, " his memory swamps his mind." 
The story is, in reality, all told in the prelude 
of the convent scene. A greater artist, with a 
Shakespearean sense of plot interest or a deeper 
mind, with a more profound sense of the intol- 
erableness of tears and wounds unrelieved by 
some onlooking hope, would never have gone 
back from that beginning to gloat over the woes 
that lead up to the final woe. It is as if the 
novelist played with his characters — doomed 
and plainly declared to be doomed — as a cat 
plays with a half-dead mouse. 

The stories and sketches so far translated 
are well enough chosen to give bits of all sorts 
of Balzac's writing, — all, at least, that would 



An Impression of Balzac 91 

bear this climate. They are never vicious, but 
there is a tolerably frank animalism in the 
point of view. The motives and qualities por- 
trayed are not such as interest the best of us 
in each other. It is always man and woman 
seen closely and depicted strenuously, but seen 
only skin-deep, — and to that depth we are 
still the primitive animal. The sketch, "A 
Passion in the Desert," represents Balzac at 
his best. Nothing could be more perfect than 
these pictures. 

The sudden birth of an interest in Balzac in 
this country is symptomatic of several things. 
In the first place, like the recent interest in 
Russian literature, it denotes a commendable 
aspiration to reach out beyond our own pro- 
vincial horizon, and to learn what it is that 
other races and temperaments admire. Fur- 
thermore, It indicates a partial reaction from 
the too-easy accepted delusion that all French 
literature is highly objectionable, and espe- 
cially all realistic French novels. But the in- 
terest in Balzac, particularly, suggests above 
all the suspicion that our civilization — and 
shall we say peculiarly that of the region from 
which this series of translations emanates ? — 
has reached the stage of profound ennui. The 
mind that craves the endless narratives of Bal- 
zac must be, if not individually entzuye, at least 



92 Literature and Criticism 

the product of a society that is so. It is only 
when one has lost the vigorous freshness of an 
interest in real life, as it actually lies throbbing 
about him, that such fiction can greatly prosper 
with him. Yet it is something gained if weari- 
ness with the near ends in aspiration for the 
distant ; and, once out of one's petty province, 
one may chance to go very far. 



THREE SONNETS 

A LITERARY friend of mine, who is a little 
irritable and subject to attacks of extreme 
views, has made a rather late discovery of the 
fine qualities of modern French literature. Ac- 
cordingly, in order to be well off with the old 
love before being* on with the new, he has taken 
to reviling the German. How many people, 
he wants to know, have gone to the study of 
German because of the alluring tradition that 
Carlyle was to " find what he wanted there " ? 
And of the number how many have come to 
make the reflection that if, indeed, he found it 
he must have taken it all away with him ? The 
trouble is, perhaps, that my friend went to the 
Germans for imaginative literature. And now 
he finds their literature essentially unpoetic. 
Their fiction, he says, is diffuse and tedious. In 
his worst moments he insists that their poetry 
is dull. At first attractive, the monotonous 
canter or jog-trot of its metres becomes weari- 
some, with the noisy click and clank of their 
consonant-encumbered rhymes. Moreover, it 
is always Bltimen and Blumen^ and never any 



94 Literature and Criticism 

particular species of flower ; always Duft and 
Ltifty Klagcn and Schlagen^ Herz and Sch77terz^ 
and never any specific variety of sound or color 
or feeling. It is as if only the commonest as- 
pects of nature or life had ever been appre- 
hended, and these few meagre " properties " 
had been handed on from one poet to another 
as perpetual heirlooms. This is, no doubt, the 
exaggerated view of a late convert to another 
cultus. Yet it is no wonder that he is charmed 
with the recent school of French poets. How 
delicate, how subtile, how opalescent, with all 
manner of vanishing gleams of beauty, natural 
and spiritual, seems this poetry, compared with 
that of their more heavily moulded neighbors ! 
The sonnets of Sully Prudhomme, for exam- 
ple, — it is impossible to translate them ; tint 
and perfume have vanished from the pressed 
flower. But one is possessed to attempt it, as 
in the three sonnets offered here : — 

SIESTE 

Je passerai I'ete dans I'herbe, sur le dos, 

La nuque dans les mains, les paupieres mi-closes, 

Sans meler un soupir a I'haleine des roses, 

Ni troubler le sommeil leger des clairs echos ; 

Sans peur je livrerai mon sang, ma chair, mes os, 
Mon etre, au cours de I'heure et des metamorphoses, 
Calme, et laissant la f oule innombrable des causes 
Dans I'ordre universel assurer mon repos ; 



Three Sonnets 95 

Sous le pavilion d'or que le soleil deploie, 
Mes yeux boiront I'ether, dont I'immuable joie 
Filtrera dans mon ame au travers de mes cils, 

Et je dirai, songeant aux hommes : " Que font-ils ?" 
Et le ressouvenir des amours et des hames 
Me bercera, pareil au bruit des mers lointaines. 



SIESTA 

All summer let me lie along the grass, 
Hands under head, and lids that almost close ; 
Nor mix a sigh with breathings of the rose, 
Nor vex light-sleeping echo with " Alas ! " 

Fearless, I will abandon blood, and limb. 
And very soul to the all-changing hours ; 
In calmness letting the unnumbered powers 
Of nature weave my rest into their hymn. 

Beneath the sunshine's golden tent uplift 
Mine eyes shall watch the upper blue unfurled, 
Till its deep joy into my heart shall sift 

* 

Through lashes linked ; and, dreaming on the world, 
Its love and hate, or memories far of these. 
Shall lull me like the sound of distant seas. 



ETHER 

Quand on est sur la terre etendu sans bouger, 
Le ciel parait plus haut, sa splendeur plus sereine ; 
On aime a voir, au gre d'une insensible haleine, 
Dans I'air sublime fuir un nuage leger j 



96 Literature and Criticism 

II est tout ce qu'on veut : la neige d'un verger, 
Un archange qui plane, une echarpe qui traine, 
Ou le lait bouillonnant d'une coupe trop pleine ; 
On le voit different sans I'avoir vu changer. 

Puis un vague lambeau lentement s'en detache, 
S'efface, puis un autre, et I'azur luit sans tache, 
Plus vif, comme I'acier qu'un souffle avait terni. 

Tel change incessament mon etre avec mon age ; 
Je ne suis qu'un soupir animant un nuage, 
Et je vais disparaitre, epars dans Tinfini. 



THE CLOUD 

Couched on the turf, and lying mute and still, 
While the deep heaven lifts higher and more pure, 
I love to watch, as if some hidden lure 
It followed, one light cloud above the hill. 

The flitting film takes many an aspect strange : 
An orchard's snow; a far-off, sunlit sail; 
A fleck of foam ; a seraph's floating veil. 
We see it altered, never see it change. 

Now a soft shred detaches, fades from sight ; 

Another comes, melts, and the blue is clear 

And clearer, as when breath has dimmed the steel. 

Such is my changeful spirit, year by year ; 
A sigh, the soul of such a cloud, as light 
And vanishing, lost in the infinite. 



Three Sonnets 97 



DE LOIN 

Du bonheur qu'ils revaient toujours pur et nouveau 
Les couples exauces ne jouissent qu'une heure. 
Moins emu leur baiser ne sourit ni ne pleure ; 
Le nid de leur tendresse endevient le tombeau. 

Puisque I'oeil assouvi se fatigue du beau, 
Que la levre en jurant un long culte se leurre, 
Que des printemps d'amour le lis des qu'on I'effleure, 
Ou vont les autres lis va lambeau par lambeau, 

J'accepte le tourment de vivre eloigne d'elle. 
Mon homage muet, mais aussi plus fidele, 
D'aucue lassitude en mon coeur n'est puni ; 

Posant sur sa beaute mon respect comme un voile 
Je I'aime sans desir, comme on aime une etoile, 
Avec le sentiment qu'elle est a I'infini. 



IN SEPARATION 

The bliss that happy lovers dream will bloom 
Forever new shall scarce outlast the year : 
Their calmer kisses wake nor smile nor tear; 
Love's nesting-place already is its tomb. 

Since sated eyes grow weary of their prey, 
And constant vows their own best hopes betray, 
And love's June lily, marred but by a breath. 
Falls where the other lilies lie in death. 



98 Literature and Criticism 

Therefore the doom of land and sea that bar 
My life from hers I do accept. At least 
No passion will rise jaded from the feast, 

My pure respect no passing fires can stain ; 
So without hope I love her, without pain, 
Without desire, as one might love a star. 



THE CHARMS OF SIMILITUDE 

It is surprising what a pleasure we take in 
an apt similitude. Not only does it enter 
largely into our enjoyment of poetry, but it 
gives zest to all bright colloquial talk. The 
voluble centre of any group of listeners — on 
the street or in the drawing-room — is sure to 
be heard spicing his narration with the " like " 
and " as " of the frequent simile. If I were a 
novelist (as I do not at all thank Heaven I am 
not) I would keep lists of good similitudes ; 
not only those of my own invention, — which I 
should not expect to be prosperous, — but 
those picked up by the wayside in actual 
speech. It is not so much that they adorn the 
expression of thought as that they illuminate 
. it. Or if they adorn, it is as the modern jew- 
^ elry, set with the electric spark. It used to be 
J supposed that in poetry, for instance, figures of 
speech were for mere ornamentation. Now we 
know that in good poetry they are chiefly used 
for throwing light. So in colloquial speech : the 
reason we enjoy them seems to be that they hit 
out the idea like a flash. There is nothing the 



100 Literature and Criticism 

mind enjoys, after all, like getting an idea and 
getting it quick, — which is only giving in a nut- 
shell the gist of Herbert Spencer's admirable 
essay on Style. A friend was telling me the 
other day that he had a new cook. He said (he 
is a small man), " I am afraid of her. She is 
as big as a bonded warehouse." I saw in the 
paper lately that somebody expressed himself 
as being " dry as a covered bridge." And how 
can we declare the fineness of anything so 
well as by saying it is " fine as a fiddle " .'' The 
alliteration, no doubt, helps, but it does not 
count for very much. You could not substi- 
tute Jish or feather or fife or fiainingo though 
each is fine after a fashion. Nothing will 
serve but the " fiddle," with its preternatural 
shine of varnish, its perky angles and curves, 
— pointed like a saucy nose, — with perhaps 
(but this is venturing into deep psychological 
water) a suggestion, sub-conscious, of the jaunty 
fiddler with his airs and graces, dressed as if 
just out of a bandbox. "Lively as a flea" 
seems good and lively, but an old sea-captain 
of mine used to say " he flew around like a flea 
in a hot skillet." "Like a bumblebee in a 
bass drum " describes the activity of a different 
sort of temperament. 

Why would it not make a pleasant occupa- 
tion for a rainy day (" wet-weather work," as Ik 



. The Charms of Similitude loi 

Marvel would phrase it) to collect what seem 
to us the most beautiful similitudes of our 
favorite poets ? If, for instance, we were quot- 
ing from Longfellow, perhaps it would be : — 

"When she had passed it seemed like the ceasing of 
exquisite music." 

If from Shelley, it might be : — 

" And multitudes of dense, white, fleecy clouds 
Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains, 
Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind." 

If from Matthew Arnold, it might be the close 
of that beautiful ebb and flow of rhythmical 
meditation, " Dover Beach : " — 

" And we are here as on a darkling plain, 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night." 

If Browning, would it be his "Last Words," 
with their likening of the seen-unseen Beloved 
to the thither side of the moon ? 

I would like the liberty of imparting to the 
Contributors' Club an odd thing that has hap- 
pened to me; though it may be, for aught I 
know, a common experience. I began, when 
a boy, to keep an tjidex rerum. It never got 
farther than a beautifully arranged table of 
contents, and a few scattering entries made 
while the volume had the nutritious fragrance 



102 Literature and Criticism 

of the bindery still upon it. Among these 
entries, on a page headed Similitudes, are two 
similes, in very yellow ink. Now the interest- 
ing point is that I have totally forgotten whether 
they were original or selected. I hope they were 
my own ; but they sound more as if they might 
have come from Longfellow's " Hyperion," or 
from some Conversation of Landor's. It may 
be that every schoolboy (except myself) will re- 
cognize and locate them, and that some lively 
contributor will treat me with cold sarcasm, at 
some future sitting of the Club, for my igno- 
rance. Here they are : — 

"This earthly life is like an album at an 
inn : we turn over its pages curiously or wearily, 
and write a scrap of wisdom or of folly, and 
away." 

" He who has loved and served an art is like 
the child that was nursed by Persephone : he is 
not subject to the woes of other men, for he 
has lain in the lap and on the bosom of a 
goddess." 



BOOKS OF REFUGE 

" Up to forty," says the adage, " a man seeks 
pleasure ; after forty he shuns pain." How- 
ever this may be as to exact ages, there can be 
no doubt that, as we get on in life, we come to 
value things not merely as they promise some 
increment of positive enjoyment, but as they 
fortify the spirit against positive suffering. In 
one's relations to literature, for instance, cer- 
tain books acquire a greater and greater value 
in that they provide a harbor of refuge when 
the mind's barometer begins to fall, and one's 
moods are overcast and threatening. 

There really are three pretty distinct classes 
of books having this peculiar value ; and it 
becomes, at times, a nice question of spiritual 
practice which of the three sorts of remedy is 
to be, as the old doctors used to say, " exhib- 
ited." ^ 

To begin with, there is a class of writings 
that are good for nothing else but pour passer 
le temps. For this purpose, however (and it 
may happen to be, in certain crises, the most 
important purpose in the world to us), they are 



104 Literature and Criticism 

invaluable. They have precisely the opposite 
effect to that which the author of " Friends in 
Council" attributes to tobacco. The lighted 
pipe, he says, serves to arrest and make tan- 
gible the passing moment. It applies the air- 
brake to the wheels of Time, and enables us to 
discern the distinct outlines of that Present 
which otherwise — so rapidly and incessantly 
does it rush from being Future to having be- 
come Past — can scarcely be said to exist for 
us at all. It does that which the Autocrat used 
to imagine as being done to the whizzing mind- 
machinery, — sticks a lever in among the cogs, 
and brings them, for once, to a standstill. 
Now the kind of literature of which I speak 
has, I say, the precisely opposite effect. It so 
quickens the flight of time as to obliterate the 
present moment, with all its " gain-giving," its 
remorse, its too acute memory of personal mor- 
tification, its thickening Brocken shadow of 
one's own unprofitableness, of whatever sort. 
Such books, as if to help us make doubly sure 
of escaping the clutches of Faust's evil one, go 
to the other extreme from the utterance that 
was to signal his diabolic seizure, " Stay, fleet- 
ing moment, thou art so fair ! " and say, in- 
stead, " Fly, lagging moments, ye are so foul ! " 
Perhaps no one is so constantly merry as not 
to need, on occasion, such pass - the - times. 



Books of Refuge 105 

Each will have his own volumes for such a 
purpose, according to temperament and taste. 
To one, the book of travel will be the most 
effective. To another, the chain of a plot in- 
terest is necessary to hold the mind away from 
its own infelicities ; and the novel of adven- 
ture, like Reade's or Black's or Clarke Rus- 
sell's, or the novel of caricature, like Dickens's, 
will be best. To another, it will be some vol- 
ume of the old ballads or romances, or Chau- 
cer, or the lighter plays of Shakespeare. To 
still another, the very best distraction will be 
some work of natural science, potent to draw 
the mind away not only from its own cares and 
moods, but from the whole region of human 
complexities, into the colorless air of material 
things, that " toil not, neither do they spin ; " 
that "neither marry nor are given in mar- 
riage ; " that are as remote from the pain of 
excessive joy as from that of excessive woe. 
But perhaps the best resource for the average 
man is to be found in the light literature of the 
French ; especially if one does not know the 
tongue so perfectly as to destroy the additional 
interest that always comes from making one's 
way in a foreign language, where a little ex- 
citement of conjecture attends the accurate 
valuation of here and there a word. The nov- 
els of the elder Dumas, for example, — hov/ 



106 Literature and Criticism 

lightly they fillip the slow-jogging hours of a 
dull evening, and with what abandon one may 
lie back, so to speak, on the virile author's secure 
mastery of the planetary and cometary orbits of 
his always impossible but never improbable 
characters ! The Elizabethan dramatists are 
great for this purpose of rescuing a man from 
himself. It is but to take five steps to the 
bookcase, to single out and open a volume, and 
presto, change / We are in a w^orld that has 
this, among its other great advantages over our 
own : that the reader cannot possibly encoun- 
ter himself as one of its habitants. There are 
times, after some exhausting mental effort, for 
instance, — as the writing of three pages be- 
yond our proper stent, or the delivery of a lec- 
ture in a hall where one could not be heard 
back of about the third row of benches, or the 
reception of a call from some Intellectual Young 
Person who became paralytically fastened to 
the door-knob, — when one is left very much 
in the condition of Grandfather Smallweed 
after his discharge of the pillow at his fireside 
companion. At such times, all that one re- 
quires is to be shaken up and taken out of 
himself for a change of view ; it hardly matters 
in what direction. Then Shakespeare is one's 
most priceless friend. 

A second species of books of refuge is that 



Books of Refuge 107 

sort which fortify us against our " bad quarter- 
hours," by bracing up our own moral tone or 
our philosophical heroism. They are not so 
much remedies for the present attack, perhaps, 
as preventives of such in the future. They are 
the books which make a man ashamed of car- 
ing too much whether he be happy or not ; 
which present anew the higher aims and better 
estimates of life. Such are the ruminations of 
the old Stoics, and " Sartor Resartus," and the 
" Conduct of Life," and Wordsworth, and the 
later poetry of Longfellow, and the great auto- 
biographies. 

But there is still a third class, in some re- 
spects the most valuable of all. I mean the 
books that by their mere largeness of scope 
make all our own haps and mishaps, and states 
of mind or of fortune, dwindle to insignificance. 
Their voice appeals every case from die kleine 
to die grosse welt. Their motives and judg- 
ments are no longer those of our lehrjahre, but 
those of our wanderjahre. If, in French litera- 
ture, Dumas represents the pass-the-time spe- 
cies, George Sand may be taken as representa- 
tive of this self-obliterating species. Such also 
is Turgenieff, and such is Goethe. Of our 
English writers, George Eliot belongs to this 
class, and Landor, and the great historians, 
and Browning, and, again, Shakespeare in his 



108 Literature and Criticism 

deeper dramas. For all these are writers who 
see the world so large, and feel life so deep 
and full, that from their plane we watch only 
the rolling globe, and see not at all our own 
little diminished speck of a personality. 



THE MOST PATHETIC FIGURE IN 
STORY 

The inquiry has sometimes suggested itself 
to me, What is the most pathetic figure in story ? 
When I was a boy, the fate of Evangeline the 
Acadian always seemed to me the most pit- 
eous of all that I had ever known. Not so 
much at the end, — the woefulness of that find- 
ing of her lover too late did not impress me so 
much till those words had taken on their deeper 
meaning from the experience of life ; but the 
perpetual disappointment, the hope, not crushed 
and ended, but continually revived, only to be 
the "hope deferred that maketh the heart 
sick," — this seemed to me the " pity of it." 
Most poignant of all appeared that moment in 
the story, when, as Longfellow tells it, — 

" Nearer, ever nearer, among the numberless islands, 
Darted a light, swift boat, that sped away o'er the 
water. 

Gabriel was it, who, weary with waiting, unhappy and 

restless. 
Sought in the Western wilds oblivion of self and of 

sorrow. 



110 Literature and Criticism 

Swiftly they glided along, close under the lee of the 
island, 

But by the opposite bank, and behind a screen of pal- 
mettos, 

So that they saw not the boat, where it lay concealed 
in the willows. 

All undisturbed by the dash of their oars, and unseen, 
were the sleepers ; 

Angel of God, was there none to awaken the slumber- 
ing maiden ? 

Swiftly they glided away, like the shade of a cloud on 
the prairie. 

After the sound of their oars on the tholes had died 
in the distance. 

As from a magic trance the sleepers awoke, and the 
maiden 

Said with a sigh to the friendly priest, ' O Father 
Felician ! 

Something says in my heart that near me Gabriel 
wanders. 

Is it a foolish dream, an idle and vague superstition ? 

Or has an angel passed, and revealed the truth to my 
spirit ? ' " 

In after years, when this tale of the Acadian 
exiles had lost something of its pathos through 
mere familiarity, I read Chaucer's story of 
"Patient Griselde." What reader has it not 
impressed as a most piteous passage, where the 
poor mother meekly suffers the supposed loss 
of her " children twain " ? As it reads in the 
"Gierke's Tale:" — 



The Most Pathetic Figure in Story 111 

" This ugly sergeant in the same wise 
That he hire doughter caughte, right so he 
(Or werse, if men can any werse devise), 
Hath bent her sone, ful was of beautee : 
And ever in on so patient was she, 
That she no chere made of heavinesse, 
But kist her sone and after gan it blesse. 

•' Save this she praied him, if that he might, 
Hire litel sone he wold in erthe grave, 
His tendre limmes, delicat to sight. 
Fro foules and fro bestes for to save." 

And, again, when the children are brought 
back to her alive and well : — 

" Whan she this herd aswoune doun she falleth. 
For pitous joye, and after hire swouning, 
She bothe hire yonge children to hire calleth, 
And in hire armes, pitously weping, 
Embraceth hem, and tendrely kissing 
Ful like a moder with hire sake teres 
She bathed both his visage and his heres. 

" ' O tendre, o dere, o yonge children mine ! 
Your woful moder wened steadfastly 
That cruel houndes or som foul vermine 
Had eten you ; but God of his mercy. 
And your benigne fader tendrely 
Hath don you kepe : ' and in that same stound 
Al sodenly she swapt adoun to ground." 

Still later it seemed to me (and perhaps 
justly) that the instant when Lear recognizes 
Cordelia should be accounted the most pathetic 
instant of all recorded human destiny. Let me 



112 Literature and Criticism 

here, however, make the confession (and it 
goes toward showing that the drama of Shake- 
speare should be played as well as read, always 
provided it be played worthily) that it was not 
till I saw Edwin Booth portray the part that I 
realized its full power. It is where the old 
king stretches out his arms, and cries : — 

" Pray, do not mock me ! 
I am a very foolish, fond old man, 
Fourscore and upward. . . . 

Do not laugh at me ; 
For as I am a man, I think this lady 
To be my child Cordelia ! " 

But there is a pathos that moves the intel- 
lect, rather than the source of tears. And to 
this faculty it has sometimes seemed, as I have 
meditated on the woeful possibilities of human 
fate, that nothing can be more sorrowful than 
the destiny of Tithonus, the moon's aged and 
immortal lover : — 

" The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, 
The vapors weep their burden to the ground, 
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, 
And after many a summer dies the swan. 
The only cruel immortality 
Consumes : I wither slowly in thine arms, 
Here at the quiet limit of the world, 
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream 
The ever silent spaces of the East, 
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn. 



The Most Pathetic Figure in Story II3 

I asked thee, * Give me immortality.' 
Then did thou grant my asking with a smile, 
Like wealthy men who care not how they give. 
But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills, 
And beat me down and warr'd and wasted me, 
And though they could not end me, left me maim'd 
To dwell in presence of immortal youth. 

" Immortal age beside immortal youth, 
And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love, 
Thy beauty, make amends, though even now, 
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide, 
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears 
To hear me .'' 

Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold 
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet 
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the stream 
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes 
Of happy men that have the power to die, 
And grassy barrows of the happier dead." 

But to me now, as I recall the " moving acci- 
dents " of written story, perhaps that appears 
most touching which Scott relates in the poem 
of " Helvellyn ; " though the chord which it 
touches be not of sympathy with manhood, but 
only of faithful dog-hood, most "tender and 
true." The quaint prelude relates, in its old- 
fashioned prose, how " a young gentleman of 
talents and of a most amiable disposition per- 
ished by losing his way on the mountain. His 
remains were not discovered till three months 



114 Literature and Criticism 

afterwards, when they were found guarded by 
a faithful terrier bitch, his constant attendant 
during frequent solitary rambles through the 
wilds of Cumberland and Westmoreland." It 
is the same incident that Wordsworth cele- 
brates in a poem which has no passage of any- 
thing like the imaginative power of that which 
I am about to quote from Scott, yet I will re- 
call to the reader its closing stanzas : — 

" But hear a wonder, for whose sake 
This lamentable tale I tell ! 
A lasting monument of words 
This wonder merits well." 

(This of the " lasting monument " is very 
characteristic of the one bard, and how little it 
would have been characteristic of the other !) 

" The Dog which still was hovering nigh, 
Repeating the same timid cry, 
This Dog had been through three months' space 
A dweller in that savage place. 
Yes, proof was plain that since the day 
When this ill-fated Traveler died, 
The Dog had watched about the spot. 
Or by his master's side : 
How nourished here through such long time 
He knows, who gave that love sublime ; 
And gave that strength of feeling, great 
Above all human estimate ! " 

And this is the passage from Scott, doubtless 
familiar to a hundred for every one who re- 



The Most Pathetic Figure in Story 115 

members the " lasting monument " which the 
profounder yet often weaker poet wrought : — 

" Not yet quite deserted, though lonely extended, 
For, faithful in death, his mute favorite attended, 
The much-loved remains of her master defended. 
And chased the hill-fox and the raven away. 

*' How long didst thou think that his silence was slum- 
ber? 
When the wind waved his garment., how oft didst 
thou starts 
How many long days and long weeks didst thou num- 
ber, 
Ere he faded before thee, the friend of thy heart ? 
And, oh, was it meet that — no requiem read o'er him, 

No mother to weep, and no friend to deplore him. 
And thou, little guardian, alone stretch'd before him 
Unhonor'd the Pilgrim from life should depart ? 

But meeter for thee, gentle lover of nature, 

To lay down thy head like the meek mountain lamb. 

When, wilder'd, he drops from some cliff high in 
stature. 
And draws his last sob by the side of his dam." 

After all, be it noted, this is not a morbid 
but a very wholesome direction of inquiry. 
The contemplation of the real pathos of other 
lives, even if they be but products of the " blind 
life within the brain," may haply save us from 
that most contemptible of illusions, — the self- 



116 Literature and Criticism 

pitying fancy that there is anything specially 
pathetic or tragic in the commonplace fortunes 
of our own little well-enough-to-do and tea-and- 
toast-consuming life. 



GERMAN LYRIC POETRY vs. FRENCH 

If the best French lyric poetry of modern 
days has indisputably a charm of refinement 
and delicate beauty all its own, the best of the 
German has an inveterate earnestness and a 
depth of feeling that endear it to all who have 
really come into its world. One does not so 
often say of it, " How exquisite ! " " How beau- 
tiful ! " but if there be in any one's pocket-book 
some long-treasured scrap of verse, well worn 
now at the fold and edges, the chances are that 
if it is not English — written, I mean, on Eng- 
lish soil — it is German. 

Not only does the time-spirit work his special 
wonders, giving to one epoch the ballad, to an- 
other the drama, to another the subjective lyric, 
but the place-spirit, as well, has always wrought 
his own characteristic marvels. Each conti- 
nent and island and mountain rampart and 
valley basin has had its particular dippings 
in the sea and liftings into the air, its glacier- 
ploughing and meteor- sowing, not in vain. 
The result is that each spot produces its own 
flowers and its own weeds in literature. So, if 



118 Literature and Criticism 

no German could ever have written Beranger's 
rollicking "Je suis vilain et tres vilain, — Je 
suis vilain," or Hugo's " Le Cimetiere d'Eylau," 
or De Vigny's " Le Cor," or De Musset's " Le 
Poete," or Coppee's " Intimites," or " Les 
Epreuves " of Sully Prudhomme, it is equally 
certain that no Frenchman could have writ- 
ten Freiligrath's "O lieb', so lang du lieben 
kannst ! " or Hartmann's " Seit Sie Gestor- 
ben," or Griin's " Der Letzte Dichter," or any 
poem of Goethe's or Schiller's. 

It would be difficult to say just what this 
essence is which exists in one and not in the 
other. We vaguely feel the difference, rather 
than distinctly perceive it. The persistent 
earnestness of the German poem is one thing. 
The French lyric may be serious enough, and 
even sad ; but we feel it to be a passing mood, 
or a mood that surely will pass, in time. The 
German poem appears to go down, for founda- 
tion, to a sense of the permanent and essential 
seriousness of all human existence. It is writ- 
ten against a background that reflects a " sober 
coloring " upon all its feeling. The French 
lyric may be " a thing woven as out of rain- 
bows," but not on this "ground of eternal 
black." 

The contrast in the two views of nature is 
very marked. The French poet sees a thou- 



German Lyric Poetry vs. French 119 

sand delicate shades that the German misses. 
Is there a German equivalent for the nuance of 
the French perception and feeling ? But the 
every-day, obvious scenes of nature, its massive 
aspects and forces, the things that every man 
encounters, — these the German poet renders 
again with a full heart. 

Perhaps the best topics on which to feel the 
difference are those two immemorial inspirers 
of song, war and love. When the German 
poet sings of war, it is with the solemnity of 
Korner's " Gebet Wahrend der Schlacht." 
When the French poet sings of it, it is with 
the "Gai! Gai ! " of Beranger. In the one, 
you hear the heavy tread of men, a dull, regu- 
lar beat, which, after all, is not very distin- 
guishable to the ear, as to whether it be an 
advancing column or a funeral march. In the 
other, you hear only the bugles ringing, and 
shouts of enthusiasm and excitement. 

In their treatment of love there is even 
sharper contrast. The German word Hebe has 
quite a different atmosphere of suggestion from 
the French amour. The German poet sings of 
love and home ; you feel that there is at least 
a possibility that the passion of to-day will out- 
last the year, or the years. Constancy is one 
of its very elements. When the French poet 
sings of love, it is very delicate, rosy, beautiful, 



120 Literature and Criticism 

but we do not hear of home. When his mis- 
tress is past her youth, we ask ourselves, will 
she be thus loved and sung ? 

There is another side, certainly. It is only 
the German side that I am just now undertak- 
ing to defend, and it is easy to fall into the ad- 
vocate's fault of ignoring the opposite point of 
view. The truth is, it is a good thing that we 
have both these literatures. Both strains of 
music are a delight : the deep, steady, human 
tones of the German 'cello, and the brilliant, 
vibrant, penetrating notes of the French violin. 

The German poetry has certainly less variety 
than the French ; but it speaks of life, and is 
not life, in its depth and essence, something of 
a monotone ? Seek variety as we may, there 
is but one winter, one summer, in the year. 
There is but one sort of friendship, one species 
of abiding love, one ultimate close to all our 
comedies or tragedies. 

Let me not be understood to imply that the 
French poet is never in earnest, never ele- 
mental and hearty in his feeling. It is too 
easy to make these partial statements sound 
universal, and therefore manifestly unjust. 
Skillful as so many of the French are in writ- 
ing what merely makes the hour pass delight- 
fully, there are some who know how to enrich 
it as well. There is no national literature that 



German Lyric Poetry vs. French 121 

furnishes too many of those magicians who not 
only fillip the hour-glass, but make it run pure 
gold. 

A source of frequent injustice to the German 
lyric poets is the abominable English transla- 
tion that is usually furnished with German 
songs. If they contain sonorous syllables, 
fairly suited to the voice, it is all that seems 
to be required by the publishers of music ; any 
beauty or sense is permitted to evaporate in 
passing from one language to the other. I 
was struck by a new instance of this, only yes- 
terday, in the Polish songs of Chopin. One of 
them was rendered so badly that I thought I 
might venture to give here another version, im- 
perfect as it is, and not yet tried with the notes : 

MIR AUS DEN AUGEN 

" Away ! Let not mine eyes, my heart, behold you ! " 
It was your right to choose ; I heard you say, 

" Forget ! We must forget ! " Love might have told you 
'T was vain. You could not, more than I, obey. 

As the dim shadows down the pastures lengthen, 
The further sinks the day-star's fading fire, 

So in your breast will tender memories strengthen, 
Deeper and darker as my steps retire. 

At every hour, in every place of meeting. 
Where we together shared delight and pain, 

Yes, everywhere will dear thoughts keep repeating, 
" Here, too, his voice, his look, his touch, remain ! " 



122 Literature and Criticism 

And since I have given a German lyric, it 
might not be amiss to close with a French one, 
of which I have tried to give some hint, at 
least, in English, — a sonnet from the new vol- 
ume of Sully Prudhomme : — 

L'AMOUR ASSASSINfi 

Poor wretch ! that smites, in his despair insane, 
The tender mouth for which he has no bread, 
And in some lonely spot, ere it be dead, 

Covers the little corse, yet warm, ill-slain : 

So I struck down dear Love for being born ! 

I smoothed the limbs, and closed the eyes, and lone 
The darling form was left, 'neath ponderous stones ; 

Then, at my deed dismayed, I fled forlorn. 

I deemed my love was dead indeed, in vain ! 
Erect he speaks, close by the open tomb, 
Mid April lilacs even there in bloom. 

With immortelles his pale brow glorified : 

" Thou didst but wound ; I live to seek her side ; 
Not by thy hand, not thine, can I be slain ! " 



THE CLANG-TINT OF WORDS 

It is interesting to notice what a difference 
there is in words as to their atmosphere. Two 
terms that the dictionaries give as being nearly 
or quite synonymous may have widely different 
values for literary use. Each has its own envel- 
oping suggestiveness, — " airs from Heaven," 
or emanations from elsewhere. Of two words 
denoting the same object or action, one may 
come drawing with it " a light, a glory, a fair 
luminous cloud ; " the other bringing a disa- 
greeable smudge. Accordingly, in the literary 
art, it is not enough to use language with an 
exact sense of definitions; one must add to 
this logical precision a nice instinct for atmo- 
spheric effect. Just as a tone of a particular 
pitch is one thing on a flute, and another on a 
horn, each having its own timbre, so a term 
having a precise meaning is one thing if it has 
dropped caroling out of Grecian skies, and 
from the delicate hands of Keats and Shelley, 
but quite another thing if it has come clattering 
and rumbling up out of clodhoppers' horse- 
talk. Moreover, just as the difference between 



124 Literature and Criticism 

tones on various instruments is due to their 
diverse groups of harmonic over-tones, one 
superposed on another, so the individual at- 
mosphere of any word comes from its having 
its own composite set of associations, some 
faint and vague, some strong and definite, that 
have through all its history been clustering 
upon it. 

Now, this timbre or clang-tint of words can- 
not be learned from any dictionary. It must 
be caught, little by little, from a kind of house- 
hold familiarity with the choicest writers. 
Euphiiists^ we may call these best writers of 
every age ; for that much-misunderstood move- 
ment of old times, known and ridiculed as 
eiipJmisiti^ was in reality only a product of this 
instinct of refinement in the choice of terms. 
In that passage from Wordsworth's " Brougham 
Castle," — a warm bit of color that stands out 
from a cold poem like a flash of red sunset on 
bare trees in the snow, — 

" Armor rusting in his halls 
On the blood of Clifford calls; 

* Quell the Scot ! ' exclaims the Lance ; 

* Bear me to the heart of France ! ' 
Is the longing of the Shield," 

what could have been substituted for " quelP^ 1 
" Crush;' " beat;' " Jzili;' " smash;' — either 
one would have been out of the question. Or 



The Clang 'Tint of Words 125 

what could have been used instead of '^ bear'^ ? 
''Bring,'' ''take;' "fetch," " /z/^," — each is 
impossible. " Quell" and "bear," by the way, 
are not terms of every-day use in common 
speech ; yet this is the poet who is popularly 
supposed, by those who have read about him 
more than they have read him, to have abjured 
all merely literary language. The truth is, his 
distinction is rather that of having passed hon- 
est coin instead of counters. He used lan- 
guage not for the sound of it, but for the sense 
of it. The verse-carpenters had been in the 
habit of patching up their products with unfelt 
and unmeant " poetic words ;" their work was 
called " poetry " because it was not prose. 
But Wordsworth never used a word, whether 
big or little, Latin or Saxon, except to carry an 
idea ; and he picked them not only according 
to their exact sense, but according to their 
exact clang-tint as well. 

No doubt one of the most charming among 
the atmospheric qualities of words is that in- 
evitable suggestion of sincerity in their use 
which clings about the homely diction of every- 
day intercourse. Not only Wordsworth, but all 
of the good modern poets, sing for the most 
part in the same language in which they would 
talk; and, for that matter, did not Chaucer, 
and did not Shakespeare ? The best litera- 



126 Literature and Criticism 

ture and the best conversation contrive to get 
on with but one vocabulary. It is only the 
dreary scribblers that persist in prodding our 
inattentive brains with startling forms of speech. 
It is already merry times in literature when we 
are not any longer afraid of our mother tongue. 
We instinctively sheer off from any writer who 
uses what Rogers (" the poet Rogers ") called 
" album words." Certain type - metal terms 
have come to serve as ear-marks of insincerity 
and of the mere ambition to write something, 
— terms that are never used in honest speech, 
and the employment of which in conversation 
would make a man feel absurd. When we 
find the ideas common and the words uncom- 
mon we have learned that we may as well put 
down the volume, or turn the leaf of the maga- 
zine. The newspapers have some words of 
this sort, dear to them, but the betes noires of 
all lovers of straightforward English \ such are 
^' peruse ^^ and '''' replete r 

One gets a vivid sense of the different at- 
mosphere about words substantially synony- 
mous in trying to make substitutions in a proof- 
sheet. For example, the lynx-eyed proof-reader 
has some day conveyed to you, by means of the 
delicately unobtrusive intimation of a blue- 
pencil line, the fact that you have repeated a 
word three times in the space of a short para- 



The Clang -Tint of Words 127 

graph. You have to find a substitute. It is 
easy to think of half a dozen terms that stand 
for very nearly the same idea, but it is in the 
incongruous implications of them all that the 
difficulty lies. You consult your Book of 
Synonyms, and find there nearly all you have 
already thought of, but never any others. 
There is, however, one further resource. You 
have had from boyhood the " Thesaurus of Eng- 
lish Words." Hundreds of times, during all 
these years, you have referred to its wonderful 
wealth of kindred terms. You seem dimly to 
remember that on one occasion in the remote 
past you did find in it a missing word you 
wanted. It shall have one more chance to dis- 
tinguish itself. Perhaps the sentence to be 
amended reads thus : " As he tore open the 
telegram a smile of bitter mockery flickered 
across his haggard features, and he staggered 
behind the slender column." Suppose, now, 
it is the word " mockery " for which you seek 
a substitute. The Thesaurus suggests, a smile 
of bitter bathos^ bitter bicffooner}\ bitter slip-of- 
the-tongue^ bitter scurrility. Or suppose it is 
" staggered" that is to be eliminated. You find 
as alluring alternatives, he fiuctiiated^ he cur- 
veted^ he librated^ he dangled. If each one of 
these would seem to impart a certain flavor 
that is hardly required for your present pur- 



128 Literature and Criticism 

pose, you may write, he pranced, he flapped, he 
churned, he effervesced, behind the slender col- 
umn. Or should the word to be removed be 
''''haggard,'^ you have your choice between his 
squalid features, his maculated features, his 
besmeared features, his rickety features. Or, 
finally, if you are in search of something to fill 
the place of " colum7t," your incomparable hand- 
book allows you to choose freely between the 
slender tallness, the slender may-pole, the slen- 
der hummock, promontory, top-gallant-mast, pro- 
cerity, monticle, or garret. The object of this 
work, says the title-page, is " to facilitate the 
expression of ideas, and assist in literary com- 
position." 



THE OBJECTIONS TO SPELLING 
REFORM 

There are two insuperable objections, in my 
private and heretical opinion, to the so-called 
" reformed " spelling. One is that it would 
increase the already too great similarity in 
words. Syllables that are at present identical 
only to the ear would then become alike to the 
eye also. Now the true theory of a visible and 
audible language demands that the symbols of 
ideas should diffe?- as intcch as the ideas. Rite, 
right, and write are three wholly distinct ideas, 
and their symbols ought to be correspondingly 
distinct. In the natural and undisturbed de- 
velopment of a language they would differ both 
to ear and to eye ; but our present tongue is 
the result of confusing influences, and the 
sounds of our speech have been allowed in 
many instances to lose their differentiation. 
The eye, however, being a more intellectual 
organ than the ear, has refused to permit the 
visible symbols to break down into this indis- 
tinguishable similarity. If we cannot have 
every idea represented by a different symbol to 



130 Literature and Criticism 

the ear, at least let us not throw away at the 
command of a false notion whatever difference 
remains to the eye. Afete, meat^ meet ; night 
and knight; sight, site, cite ; mind and mined ; 
aisle and isle; by, bye, buy ; se?it, scent, cent; 
sell and cell ; wait and weight ; all and awl, 
and a great number of other such pairs or trip- 
lets would lose what little is left of their 
individual identity. Depend upon it, this dif- 
ference of spelling has not been a result of 
accident. It has been retained because of a 
felt instinct of the usefulness of keeping things 
separate in appearance which are separate in 
fact. Any one who has dabbled in phonogra- 
phy knows that the fatal defect of all short- 
hand systems of writing, for any but those who 
make a long-continued specialty of their use, is 
the extreme similarity of the signs, especially 
when combined in words and phrases. The 
advantage of our alphabet lies in the ingenious 
diversity of its forms, enabling the eye to seize 
on the special characteristic of each letter, 
even in hurried script. This is the secret of 
its having been retained unchanged through so 
many generations of men. 

My second objection to phonetic spelling is 
that it would petrify any language in the forms 
which it happened to have at the moment of 
adopting the " reform." Now I feel sure, what- 



The Objections to Spelling Reform 131 

ever certain eminent philologists may say, that 
the language-making instinct is by no means 
extinct in us. So far as the iron grip of the 
dictionaries will let it, language tends to move 
and change. And this, too, not at haphazard, 
but in obedience to a felt congruity between 
sound and sense. One or two examples are as 
good as a hundred to illustrate this. Why do 
children and all persons not standing in awe 
of the dictionary incline to say tiji^iy or teeny 
for a minute object, instead of tiny, if not that 
the littleness of the sound is more suited to the 
littleness of the thing .? And why do so many 
persons show a reluctance to pronouncing the 
in the name of the Deity short, as in dog or 
fog? If a fixed phonetic spelling, backed up 
by all the power of the more and more tyran- 
nical dictionaries, is allowed to paralyze all the 
instincts of growth and change in the language, 
throwing it into a dead and fossil condition 
before its time, there will be no longer possible 
such progress as, for example, that from the 
old English ic to the modern I. Ic was too 
insignificant a sound for the whole weight of 
the first person, and that, too, in its nominative 
case of willing and acting. The idea needed 
(and once had) a more fitting sound-symbol, 
and at last found it again in this noble vowel, 
a compound whose first tone is ah, that broad- 
est and fullest utterance in any language. 



PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 

The value that men have set upon art and 
literature proves that these have ministered to 
some deep-seated and permanent human de- 
sire. What is this desire ? Or if there be more 
than one, which is the deepest seated and most 
permanent — in other words, the paramount — 
desire ? The true answer to this question, if 
we can discover it, must furnish us with a 
much-needed test for literary and art values. 
It must, in short, furnish a basis, and the only 
correct basis, for the criticism of all literary 
and art products. 

For, obviously, before we are in a position 
to determine the worth of a thing, or the rela- 
tive worth of any two or three things of the 
same general sort, we have to inquire. What 
purpose is this thing intended to serve ? What 
is it expected to do ? 

Now it is precisely on this point that there 
seems to have been very confused ideas among 
critics, — and by this is not meant profes- 
sional critics only, but all those who have at- 
tempted, either for themselves or for others, to 



Principles of Criticism 133 

form correct estimates of the value or compar- 
ative values, of works of literature and art. 
Professional critics, especially (for it is they, 
especially, who have seemed to feel that they 
must not trust to their instincts, which would 
often have done better for them, but must 
make at least a show of having some well- 
understood basis of critical principles), have 
apparently been in a position not unlike that 
of a layman at some mechanics' fair, who under- 
takes to pass judgment on a machine of whose 
purpose and uses he has next to no idea. 

Perhaps the novel and the poem have been 
the most conspicuous examples of this failure, 
on the part of ordinary criticism, to base itself 
on any clear understanding of what these forms 
of the literary art are essentially for. One 
novel will be praised on the ground that it has 
a moral purpose, another on the ground (as by 
that distinguished critic, M. Taine) that it has 
not a moral purpose ; one on the ground that 
it paints actual facts from the life, another on 
the ground that it depicts an ideal world ; one 
on the ground that it gives pleasure, another 
on the ground that it gives information, and 
so on. If the novel has not all these objects 
in view (and some of them are a little incon- 
sistent with each other), which of them has it.'' 
And if several of them, which object is the 



134 Literature and Criticism 

essential one, — the one which, being accom- 
plished, the novel cannot be a thoroughly poor 
one, or which, being unaccomplished, it cannot 
be a thoroughly good one ? 

So with the poem. The reason that the 
critics have, through all time, been so ludi- 
crously incapable of making an estimate of any 
given work of poetry (except in the case of an 
imitation, where a verdict on the original had 
already been furnished them) that, should be 
corroborated, unless through accident, by the 
test of time is that there has been no clear and 
well-settled opinion as to the true purpose of 
the poetic art. Is it to move us to " pity and 
terror," and at the same time do to these feel- 
ings some ambiguous thing which Greek schol- 
ars never have been exactly able to make out, 
as Aristotle said ; or is it to " please," as 
everybody else has always said, till De Quincey 
blew one of his withering blasts at that shallow 
notion, but as the average critic apparently still 
continues to believe ? Is its true function best 
fulfilled by being so intelligible that everybody 
can understand it, or by being so unintelligible 
that nobody can, except the poet himself, and 
he only before it gets cold ? Is it true that a 
poem cannot be a true poem unless it is 
" sHort ; " or are w^e still permitted to believe 
that the Iliad is, after all, a sort of poem ? 



Principles of Criticism 135 

In seeking for reliable principles on which 
just criticism may be based, we must, if possi- 
ble, find those which are broad enough to in- 
clude all art. Otherwise we should suspect 
them of not being fundamental principles. For 
literature is, in fact, one of the fine arts. Not 
everything that is written, of course, belongs to 
literature proper ; but when a written product 
becomes a part of what has well enough been 
called belles-lettres, — as a poem, for example, 
in contradistinction from a Patent Office Re- 
port, — it belongs to the art of literature, and 
is closely allied to the other fine arts ; giving 
us, like them, that immediate and direct satis- 
faction of a high order which we call aesthetic 
pleasure, or delight. Literature, as we shall 
see, gives us much more than this, but this it 
gives us in common with the other arts. 

If, then, we ask for a test or criterion for art 
in general, the reply may be made. The true 
test is that it shall be beautiful. But the un- 
derlying question is. What is "beauty," and 
what things are " beautiful " .? 

Evidently beauty is not a simple quality, ap- 
prehended by a distinct inner sense, the "sense 
of beauty," though it has sometimes crudely 
been so considered. It is plain enough, on 
reflection, that beauty is a complex thing, and 
requires analysis. All great works of art, and 



136 Literature and Criticism 

especially of the literary art, are more than 
merely beautiful, but we may first of all inves- 
tigate this quality. 

Let us take, to begin with, as the simplest 
of the arts, that of visible form. Its simplest 
element is the line ; then the curved line, as of 
the mountain or wave outline. Its highest and 
most complex product is the statue, or group 
of statuary. 

The writers on aesthetics, in their attempts 
to furnish an analysis of the beautiful, have 
seemed to hover at a greater or less distance 
around a central idea, none — unless it be Mr. 
Herbert Spencer, whose views have been ex- 
pressed only in scattered suggestions — pre- 
cisely hitting it, and yet few being far away 
from it. We mean the idea that beauty gives 
us activity of mind and feeling. Hogarth, for 
example, speaks of the quality of variety in 
lines as an element of their beauty. The wav- 
ing line, or undulating curve, he calls especially 
the " line of beauty," because it gives the eye 
much variety of direction without displeasing 
it (without hindering it, we should prefer to 
say) by sudden changes of direction. Sir Wil- 
liam Hamilton, in likewise attributing the effect 
of beauty to the union of variety with unity, 
explains our delight in it by the fact of its giv- 
ing full play at once to the imagination through 



Principles of Criticism 137 

variety, and to the understanding through unity. 
Alison, attributing the entire effect to the asso- 
ciation of ideas, makes beauty to consist in the 
power of giving active emotions, as of cheer- 
fulness or sadness, and of awakening trains of 
corresponding ideas in the mind. Mr. James 
Sully points out the imperfection of this theory 
in its exclusion of the element of direct aesthetic 
pleasure derived from color, form, or tone. 
Mr. Herbert Spencer, following a hint derived 
from Schiller, considers the aesthetic activities 
to be essentially the play of the mind. He 
grades aesthetic pleasures according to the 
number of powers called into activity ; the low- 
est being the pleasure of mere sensation, as 
from tone or color ; next, the pleasure of per- 
ception, as from combinations of color, or sym- 
metries of form ; and highest, the pleasure of 
the aesthetic sentiments proper, composed of 
multitudinous emotions excited in the mind by 
associations, some of them reaching far back 
in the race experience of man. 

The central idea, round which these and 
other theories cluster, is that of increased ac- 
tivity as the essential effect of beauty on the 
mind. 

In the two arts of form and of tone, the sim- 
plest elements — the straight line and the sin- 
gle tone — may be considered as correspond- 



138 Literature and Criticism 

ent. For the tone differs from mere noise in 
being produced by periodic vibrations, so that 
in its apprehension our consciousness is con- 
tinuous ; whereas in hearing a mere noise, owing 
to the interferences of the jumbled vibrations, 
our consciousness is interrupted and intermit- 
tent. Precisely so, an irregular and confused 
multitude of dots made by the pencil on paper 
would be a noise in visible form ; while a con- 
tinuous row of dots, that is to say a straight 
line, would be a tone in form. In the tone as 
in the line the consciousness is unhindered and 
continuous. Again, just as we may have a 
noise of tones which, although musical tones 
separately, are clashed together in discord, so 
we may have a noise, so to speak, of lines 
clean and straight in themselves, but thrown 
into a tangled mass which the eye cannot fol- 
low. 

Rising a step higher, we have the curve in 
form, answering to the melody in music. In 
either case, its effect is a succession of changes 
of impression, but of such a nature that the 
consciousness may be continuous in appre- 
hending them. A jagged and irregularly an- 
gular line, on the other hand, would correspond 
to a haphazard succession of tones, regardless 
of the conditions of melodious arrangement, 
since both produce checks and interruptions of 



Principles of Criticism 139 

the flowing continuity of consciousness. Ho- 
garth's line of beauty, in other words, is the 
pleasantest melody of form, because it gives to 
conscious apprehension the greatest total of 
sight activity without check. 

But a harmony, whether of audible tones or 
of visible forms, is still more delightful than a 
melody. Such a harmony of forms we get in 
the symmetry of two curves above and below a 
horizontal line, as in the arch of a bridge re- 
flected in a stream, or on the two sides of a 
vertical line, as in the shapely tree. Its sim- 
plest elements might be represented thus : — 

(• ) 

More graceful still is the symmetry of two 
undulating curves, answering to each 
other, and thus furnishing both mel- 
ody and harmony. And this brings 
us to the elements of one of the 
beautiful forms of ancient art. For 
joining the extremities of the two 
curves, we have the vase. If now we 
add to each side another answering 
pair of such curves, we have it with 
the double arms of the Greek am- 
phora. And if we add still another such pair 
at the top, we have reached a hint of the very 







140 Literature and Criticism 

outlines of that which we consider 
the most graceful of all forms, the 
human figure. For it would require 
but slight touches to suggest the 
head and the veritable arms and 
limbs of the statue. 

No doubt there is much in the 
beauty of the human form besides 
the mere symmetry of graceful lines ; 
much that depends on the associa- 
tion of ideas, as, for example, the 
suggestion of force and activity in muscular 

curves, — 

" Those lines 
That sweeping downward breathe, in rest, of motion." 

The important thing to notice is that just as 
the simple grace of the mere outlines is ex- 
plicable through their ministering to sight ac- 
tivity, so the complex beauty is woven of a 
thousand threads of vague suggestion, all linked 
with ideas of health and strength and myste- 
rious life-functions, and so all centring in the 
satisfaction of the one desire for full exist- 
ence. 

But complex as the quality of beauty is in 
the actual human figure, it is even more so in 
the work of plastic art. A statue which was 
merely an exact copy of life — a photograph in 
marble — would not by any means give us all 



Principles of Criticism 141 

the aesthetic delight of which art is capable. 
In fact, it would not be art at all. It is only 
when the artist bodies forth some conception 
of his own mind that we are greatly stirred. 
Then, besides the immediate beauty of the 
melodies and harmonies of lines, and the me- 
diate beauty, through associated ideas, of the 
supple and forceful forms, we have in some 
pathetic or heroic group in marble a world of 
quickened thoughts and feelings. In one of 
Wilhelm von Humboldt's " Letters to a Lady," 
he says, — 

" The beauty of a work of art is, for the very 
reason that it is a work of art, much freer from 
imperfections than nature, and never excites 
selfish emotions. We observe it attentively, 
we wonder at it more and more, but we do not 
form any connection between it and ourselves. 
To the beauty of sculpture applies what Goethe 
has said so finely of the stars : ' We never 
desire the stars, although we take such pleasure 
in their light.' " 

Now the explanation of this superiority of 
art to nature, aesthetically, is to be found in the 
fact that any personal relation to self narrows 
and lessens the spiritual activity. And the 
same explanation is applicable to the connec- 
tion of aesthetic pleasures with the play im- 
pulse. For the compelling of any impulse to- 



142 Literature and Criticism 

ward the accomplishment of some set purpose 
must confine its force. The stream of spiritual 
activity is controlled into some single channel, 
and there is no longer that free swing of all 
the powers which is the essence both of " play " 
and of esthetic delight. In other words, if we 
enjoy play more than work, and art more than 
nature, it is because we have through their 
means a greater total of conscious life. 

The art of tone has this advantage over the 
arts of painting and sculpture as the direct 
source of power upon the spirit, that music is 
a natural and universal means of expression. 
There can never be " symphonies of color," as 
has been imagined, for the reason that nowhere 
in the world is color naturally (as distinguished 
from artistically) employed to express anything. 
Tone, on the contrary, is universally so em- 
ployed. Mr. Spencer, in his " Essay on the 
Origin of Music," and elsewhere, has admira- 
bly shown how this expressive use of tone runs 
through all the higher grades of the animal 
kingdom. When the dog barks or howls, and 
the bird pipes or complains, and the child sings 
or cries, it is the beginning of music. For it 
is the beginning of the use of tones to express 
feeling. Ordinary human speech is not speech 
alone, conveying ideas, but music as well, con- 
veying feeling. If we listen to an animated 



Principles of Criticism 143 

conversation from an adjoining room, where 
the articulation of words is not quite audible, 
we shall find that it is song, rather than speech, 
that we hear. The voices go up and down the 
gamut, the intervals and the tempo increasing 
or diminishing as the feeling changes. The 
staccato, high-keyed utterances of pleasure ; the 
slow, minor cadences of sorrow ; the deep mon- 
otone of determination ; the tremolo of passion, 
— all these are nothing but the song within the 
speech. Whenever speech ceases to convey- 
merely cold intellectual ideas, and becomes 
emotional, the voice tends more and more 
toward song, ranging more widely through the 
gamut, and taking on the cadences of music 
proper. Perhaps even among the very ele- 
ments of speech, in the vowels, namely, we 
have the beginnings of music as expressive of 
feeling. For while the consonants seem to be 
mere checks or interruptions of the breath, ex- 
pressing the limitation of our consciousness to 
definite ideas, the vowels are pure tones, each 
having a natural pitch of its own (which one 
may readily detect by whispering them loudly), 
and expressing the play of feeling upon these 
ideas. This may possibly help to explain the 
ablaut, or change of vowel to express tense in 
the verb ; as, si7ig, sa?ig, sung. We do not over- 
look the theory which explains this by the 



144 Literature and Criticism 

effect of the ancient reduplication ; but it 
sometimes happens in philology, as in society, 
that one cause gives rise to a form, and another 
makes it permanent. At any rate, the present 
fact is that, while the consonants remain the 
same in the different tenses in this example, as 
expressing the unchanged idea of the action, 
the vowels change, as the attitude or feeling of 
the mind toward the action changes, whether 
present, or just finished, or wholly past. 

The reason, then, that music has a much 
greater direct power over the feelings than any 
other art is that music alone is based on a 
natural means of emotional expression. But 
its power of expression does not stop with the 
feelings. Inextricably bound up with every 
human feeling is a host of ideas associated 
with it in the mind, — for every feeling a host 
of ideas, for the reason that the possible feel- 
ings are few, while ideas are innumerable. 
Accordingly, music, whose power of direct ex- 
pression is almost limited to the emotions, 
expresses different ideas to different persons, 
— or to ourselves at different times, — accord- 
ing as the particular emotion is associated in 
experience with one set of ideas or another. 
The sonata which to an Alpine goatherd would 
express a thunderstorm among rocky peaks to 
a sailor might with equal distinctness express 



Principles of Criticism 145 

a tempest at sea. The larger and deeper the 
life experience of the listener, the more a sym- 
phony will mean to him in ideas ; or the fuller 
his emotional endowment, the more it will 
mean to him in feeling, — always provided 
that it is a great work, a work of genius, to 
which he listens. Of course much can come 
out of a symphony only if much originally went 
into it. 

The secret of all art is then within the reach 
of our hand when we have realized one single 
fact concerning man. As we look out upon 
life we see its myriad activities all springing 
from certain desires. But there is one desire 
among them which is permanent, and para- 
mount to all. It is not the desire for mere 
pleasure, for it often overrides that ; it is not 
the desire for mere happiness, even, for it often 
overrides that. It is the desire for life : not 
the poor negative desire to escape death and 
cling to existence, merely, but the aspiration 
for full and abounding life. To be alive in 
every faculty; to have the greatest possible 
total of conscious being, in physical impres- 
sion and effect, in intellectual force and grasp, 
in emotional glow, in the out-stream of the ac- 
tive will ; in short, completely to be and live : 
this is the one paramount human desire. There 
is only one thing we really dread ; it is death. 



146 Literature and Criticism 

There is only one thing we really desire ; it is 
life. 

And now where is there to be found a per- 
petual source of this power and activity that 
we perpetually desire ? Nowhere but in the 
expressed power and activity of other human 
spirits, — and that is art. 

We have seen that in their very elements 
the arts are based on the ability to satisfy this 
desire. For the beauty of form consists in 
giving the sense of sight its greatest total of 
unchecked apprehension ; and the beauty of 
tone, both in those consecutive harmonies 
which we call melodies and in massed har- 
monies, in giving the sense of hearing its great- 
est total of uninterrupted impression. And 
when we pass beyond mere sensuous delight 
we find the same essential effect — but on the 
mind now, and the whole soul — from the ideas 
and feelings expressed by the artist. 

The test, then, for all art is that, expressing 
much life, it shall give much life. That paint- 
ing, statue, symphony, is the greatest which 
adds the greatest total to our conscious exist- 
ence. But we must mark well a distinction 
here. There are higher and lower grades or 
planes of existence. But by what test .'' By 
no other than this same test, — their tendency 
for or against renewed and increased life in 



Principles of Criticism 147 

the whole nature. That pleasure is low which 
tends to belittle the nature ; that one is high 
which tends to enlarge it. That art is low 
which only stimulates feelings and ideas most 
apt to brutalize ; that is to say, to restrict and 
narrow (for that is the distinction between 
brute and man, — the one little, the other 
large, in powers and possibilities). That art 
is high which awakens feelings and ideas that 
are vital with tendencies toward more and still 
more of attainment and being. 

And here we see the distinction between 
mere prettiness and genuine beauty. A patch 
of color on the wall may be called pretty, as 
pleasing the color sense alone ; still more so, 
if it gratifies also the form sense by its outline. 
But it falls short of beauty because it fails 
to awaken in us any of the higher activities 
of our inner nature. Decorative art is only 
pretty ; it touches but the surface of the mind. 
Decorative poetry, in the same way, suggests 
only pretty images of color or form. We pass 
along a picture-gallery, or we turn the leaves 
of a volume of verse. As we pause before 
some painting or some poem, the question is, 
What does this give me ? It may be that it 
gives the imagination some pretty image of na- 
ture. This is something. It may be that it 
gives the feeling, also, some touch of suggested 



148 Literature and Criticism 

peace or tranquillity. That is more. But if it 
be a great picture, or a great poem, the whole 
spirit in us is quickened to renewed life. Not 
only our sense of color and form, our percep- 
tion of harmonious relations, but our interest 
in some crisis of human destiny, our thought 
concerning this, a hundred mingled streams of 
fancy and reflection and will impulse are set 
flowing in us ; because all this was present in 
the man of genius who produced the work, and 
because his " expression " of it there means 
the carrying of it over from his spirit into ours. 
If it is a work of the very greatest rank, we 
are more, from that moment and forever. For 
out of the life the artist or the poet has given 
us will be born successive new accessions of 
life perpetually. 

The art of literature is the highest of the 
arts because its power of expression is greatest. 
The effect of music may be more intense at a 
given moment, but its range is not so wide, nor 
its effect so enduring. And poetry is the high- 
est form of the literary art, by our test, as hav- 
ing the fullest expressive power ; since it not 
only expresses thought, like prose, but feeling 
also. 

That poetry contains in itself the elements 
of the lower arts, a moment's reflection will 
show. In the first place, it contains the ele- 



Principles of Criticism 149 

ments of the arts of form, of which sculpture is 
the purest example. For it conveys a troop of 
images, appealing to the inner eye, instead of 
the outer. In the second place, poetry con- 
tains the elements of music. For in its rhythm, 
its rhyme, its music of many sorts, a succession 
of melodies and harmonies are heard — by the 
inner ear, when read silently, or by the outer, 
when read aloud. The verse form is most 
fitly used, therefore, when it is used for the ex- 
pression of thought and feeling together; of 
thought, in other words, which is aglow with 
feeling, and feeling which is illuminated by 
thought. It is equally an impertinence to use 
the verse form — that is, the musical form — 
for dry, cold ideas, or for mere vague feeling, 
unlighted by thought. The former is for 
speech unaccompanied by music ; the latter is 
for music unaccompanied by speech. A man 
may say — not sing — a mathematical demon- 
stration ; he may sing — not say — an outburst 
of emotion. For this reason instruments are 
better than voices for great music. Or if the 
voice must be used, it is best if the words are 
in a foreign tongue which is unfamiliar to the 
listener. In this way the speech element of an 
opera, nearly always foolish, is concealed ; and 
the music element, when really good, has its 
opportunity. It is conceivable, to be sure, that 



150 Literature and Criticism 

there might be (as Wagner dreamed and seemed 
on the verge of accomplishing) an action so 
high, expressed in speech so noble and signifi- 
cant, that it would not belittle its accompany- 
ing music in making it limited and definite in 
its suggestion. A good deal of our modern 
verse errs in the reverse direction ; that is to 
say, it is mere music, — flowing rhythm, and 
sounding rhymes, and a pretty babble of in- 
significant "words, words, words," — expres- 
sive, thus, of some vague atmosphere of feeling, 
without any thought. But this would have 
been more fitly expressed in music proper ; it 
is only a part, and the lesser part of the re- 
quirement in poetry. 

In illustration of the statement that poetry 
contains in itself the elements of the arts of 
form, as giving a succession of beautiful images, 
we may take a single passage from Longfellow's 
"Evangeline." Here, close together (using 
the poet's own words), we have the morning of 
June with its music and sunshine, the gleam of 
water, the silvery sand-bars, the dusky arch 
and trailing mosses of the cypress, the moon- 
Hght indistinctly gleaming through the ruined 
cedars, the pendulous stairs of the grapevines 
with hummingbirds rising and descending, the 
measureless prairie at night with the fireflies 
floating above it, the southward rivers running 



Principles of Criticism 151 

to the sea side by side like the great chords of 
a harp in loud and solemn vibrations. More- 
over, each idea brings with it to the mind a 
complex of associated thought and emotion, 
and not merely from our own individual life 
experience. The human race has come a long 
way. As we read the line in the " Lady of the 
Lake," — 

" When danced the moon on Monan's rill," 

it is not alone the intrinsic beauty of the scene 
that interests us. We could imitate the effect, 
so far as the bodily eye is concerned, by a 
candle glancing on a scrap of crinkled tin. Nor 
is it any definite association of our own past 
enjoyment in connection with such a scene. 
There are associations — as Mr. Herbert Spen- 
cer has pointed out — too vague and dim to 
define ; faint reverberations of whole aeons of 
human, and perhaps of animal, experience. 
The deep forest was once full of the dread of 
unknown dangers and the expectancy of un- 
known delights ; the shadow of the mountain 
had for man the chill of supernatural visita- 
tions ; by the moonlit rill the savage — and, 
ages before, the wilder creature of the woods — 
sought and slew his prey, or sought and won 
his mate. 

To illustrate the inclusion of the elements of 



152 Literature and Criticism 

the art of tone, also, in poetry, we may take 
the same poem, " Evangeline." To begin with, 
the metre is music. The accents, following 
each other in rhythmical order, give us not 
only the element of time, such as a metronome 
would give, but a veritable tune, as well. If 
we recite the line, — 

" When she had passed it seemed like the ceasing of 
exquisite music," 

we find not only that it is capable of being 
written in bars of | time, with eighth and dotted 
eighth and sixteenth notes, but that the ac- 
cented tones are given on a different pitch, 
each dactyl making a cadence, or phrase, of 
three different tones. 

These lines of English hexameter (that is, 
accent hexameter) seem to follow each other 
like ocean waves on the shore. The first half 
of the line is the wave rolling in ; then it pauses, 
toppling into a crest, and crumbles down into 
foam in the last half. As we might represent 
it,— 

" Rolling, then rearing its crest, and foaming and falling 
in thunder." 

So wave after wave of the sonorous verse rolls 
in, timing itself (as Dr. Holmes suggests of 
another metre) to the very ebb and flow of our 
blood and our breathing : a phrase to each 
pulse-beat, and a line to each breath. 



Principles of Criticism 153 

The rhyme system of verse, again, is entirely 
music. There are three sets of rhymes, in 
reaUty : the initial, or consonant rhyme (or 
alliteration) ; the medial rhyme, or chime of 
the vowels in the interior of the words ; and 
the final rhyme. We may note, first of all, that 
as in rhythm, so in rhyme, we have the prin- 
ciple that lies at the foundation of music, — 
unity in variety ; the greatest total of conscious 
impression being received through chords, — 
that is, through a variety of tones made possi- 
ble to apprehend by their relations of agree- 
ment, or unity. If we take the old couplet 
(which is truly poetry, too, as being wise as 
w^ell as musical), — 

" Love me little, love me long, 
Is the burden of my song," 

we notice first, as most obvious, the final rhyme. 
The books define rhyme badly, as being the 
agreement between two sounds. That really 
makes but half a i-hyme. We must have the 
difference, as well as the agreement ; the variety, 
as well as the unity. In other words, ong and 
07tg, in this example, are not rhymes : they are 
identical sounds ; they constitute a unison, not 
a harmony. But long and song are rhymes, 
since now a different consonant precedes each. 
The initial rhyme involves the same prin- 
ciple, only reversed ; the unity being now in 



154 Literature and Criticism 

the consonants, the variety in the following 
sounds. The important part which this initial 
rhyme plays in verse is often overlooked, from 
the circumstance that the alliteration is so com- 
monly concealed ; as in this line : — 

" He was already at rest, and she longed to slumber 
beside him." 

The r of rest rhymes with the r of already, the 
/ of slumber with the / of longed, and the s of 
beside with the s of slumber, though all these 
are concealed to the eye by not being visibly 
initial letters. This consonant rhyme, by the 
way, addresses the mind as well as the ear (as 
might be expected from the more intellectual 
character of the consonants) ; the alliteration 
in good verse always striking the emphatic 
syllable, and (as Mr. John Earle neatly ex- 
presses it) marking out to the mind " the crests 
of the thought," as in the line just quoted. 

The medial rhyme, or chime of interior vow- 
els, also plays a concealed part in the music 
of the best verse. Taking again the couplet, 
"Love me little," etc., if we utter the vowels 
alone we shall hear their chime. Moreover, 
since each vowel has a natural pitch of its 
own, by whispering the vowels in these lines 
vigorously, we shall hear a distinct tune of dif- 
ferent notes, which might be written upon a 
staff in musical notation. 



Principles of Criticism 155 

The best verse in which to study these vari- 
ous musical elements is that of Mother Goose. 
And this for two reasons : first, because it is a 
kind of profanation to make a corpus vilum of 
good poetry for dissection ; and secondly be- 
cause the lines of Mother Goose have been 
preserved purely on account of this very per- 
fection of musical form, having had no other, 
or little other, raison d^etre. Out of thousands 
of jingles repeated to children, the fittest only 
have survived, and these are, accordingly, very 
perfect specimens so far as the outer shell of 
poetry is concerned. A college class, for ex- 
ample, in studying verse with a thoroughly 
scientific analysis, could not do better than to 
provide themselves with copies of this immor- 
tal bard for class-room use. If one were to 
exhaust completely the possibilities of analysis 
of, say, this quatrain, 

" Old King Cole was a jolly old soul, 
^ And a jolly old soul was he ; 

He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl, 

And he called for his fiddlers three," 

he would know a great deal about the very 
imperfectly understood science of English 
verse.^ 

1 The work of Sidney Lanier on English verse may 
be recommended as the only one that has ever made any 
approach to a rational view of the subject. Nor are the 
standard ones overlooked in makmg this assertion. 



156 Literature and Criticism 

But a genuine poem, while containing (by its 
images to the inner eye, and its music to the 
inner ear) these elements of the lower arts, goes 
beyond them in expressing more fully than 
any other form has been found able to do the 
soul of the writer to the soul of the reader. In 
this way it stands as the highest species of its 
own — which is the highest — genus, the art 
of literature. And the other — the prose — 
forms of literature must be ranked precisely 
according to this power of expressiveness. 

We might draw off in a tabular scheme the 
different forms of literature, classified on this 
basis. At the bottom we should have those 
written works which are books, indeed, but not 
yet literature ; as the almanac, the arithmetic, 
the receipt-book, the text-book on natural sci- 
ence. These, and a vast number of others, do 
not belong to the art of literature, or to litera- 
ture proper, simply because they do not express 
the writer, and therefore have no power (to 
come back to our test of criticism) to stir or 
quicken the reader. They are merely fact- 
books. Rising a little higher in our table of 
forms, we may put down certain books which, 
though still fact-books, begin to convey some- 
thing also of the observer's own personality. 
Such are certain books of travel, or of the higher 
natural science. They begin to be literature, 



Principles of Criticism 157 

because they begin to be humanly expressive. 
A little higher in our tabular scheme will come 
books of human science, wherein the writer is 
more apt to give something of himself (not 
narrowly, as an individual, but as one repre- 
senting universal human nature) together with 
his objective results. Especially is this true 
as we rise into the region of the profounder 
human problems, where our books are fact- 
books, to be sure, but the " facts " are now of 
such breadth and importance that we incline 
rather to call them " truths." 

More and more filly may those works be 
called truth-books as we rise to the region of 
literature proper. Here, also, we classify and 
rank according to expressive power. The essay 
expresses more than the history, because the 
writer is more free to reveal his own inner life 
in his work ; and it contributes to us, of course, 
just in proportion to what it takes from him. 
The more life goes in, the more life comes out. 
And above the essay ranks fiction, on this same 
ground. And among the different forms of 
fiction the novel stands the highest, as being 
the epitome, not only of what the writer has 
seen, but of what the writer has lived and been 
and now is. Highest of all, as we have said, 
is the poem ; because here the writer felt the 
most freedom, and could therefore exert the 



158 Literature and Criticism 

most power. Keble was perhaps the first to 
point out that the verse form is not only a con- 
cealer, but a revealer. That is to say, it reveals 
just because the writer felt that he was con- 
cealed. The mask becomes itself the most 
transparent sort of window. 

And which form of poetry shall we set high- 
est by our test, — the narrative, the dramatic, 
or the lyric ? 

We may be helped to answer this by observ- 
ing a fact, which is either a mere coincidence, 
or goes far to corroborate our view of the true 
basis of our valuation of literature. It is the 
fact that just in proportion with the increase of 
expressive power, in our tabulated scheme of 
literary forms, goes also an increase in perma- 
nence of value in the world. The mere fact- 
books are superseded, and become valueless. 
The truth-books become more and more of 
permanent value as we rise to their higher re- 
gions. And we are most apt to find that the 
thing that has survived time and storm in the 
world's shifting history is some frail bit of a 
lyric poem ; because this holds in its crystal- 
line heart the life of a man ; and when we are 
dead — or half dead — spiritually, out breaks 
again from the heart of the crystal that spark 
of abounding life which is the thing that of all 
others we desire. 



Principles of Criticism 159 

When a mind expresses in a book its mere 
perception of some external object, it is not yet 
literature. Before the same object every one's 
perception, if normal, would be the same. The 
expression of it in writing can add nothing to 
our inner life beyond what the object itself 
would add.^ It is only when the writer, like 
the coral insect, builds himself into his work, 
expressing inner states of thought, feeling, or 
purpose, either of his own individuality or, 
best of all, of the universal human being, that 
the book becomes literature. Literature, for 
this reason, always has a " style : " an expres- 
sion characteristic of the man, the reflex of 
something his own ; through which, at least, 
the truth — however universal — had to pass. 
As in other arts, if a painter exactly repre- 
sented an actual laughing child, or if a musi- 
cian exactly copied the wailing of a hurt child, 
it would not yet be art, for it would convey 
nothing to us beyond what the external object 
itself would convey ; so in literature, if a poet 

1 This bears on the question of the comparative values 
of natural science and the humanities in education. A 
fish in a book can be expected to go no farther toward 
educating a mind than a fish in a pool. It can stimulate 
observation, and attract a dormant attention, and reveal 
many interesting facts about the non-human world, but 
that is all. Whereas a man's life in a book can renew 
and increase the whole intellectual and spiritual life. 



160 Literature and Criticism 

exactly paints in words a white rose, it may be 
very pretty, but it is not yet a genuine poem. 
But let him give us the rose, plus his feeling 
and thought about it, — sincerely his, but based 
on what is ours also, and man's universally, — 
and it is a poem. Or let it be a fact instead 
of an object, — say, the falling of an apple to 
the ground in a garden. When a writer de- 
scribes it just as it is, and nothing beyond it, 
we say it is a "fact " that the apple falls. When 
he gives it to us plus some activity of his rea- 
son which links it with the revolving moon, 
expressing now the law of universal gravitation, 
we say it is a great "truth." And if, in its 
expression, he adds also the free play of his 
own mind and feeling upon it, he may give us 
a work of pure literature ; perhaps — most 
likely in this case — a lyric poem. 

The secret of all art, then, is simply this 
open secret : that it is the giver of what we 
most of all desire, abounding life. It draws 
upon an inexhaustible supply. For it is not 
merely the artist's own individual spirit which 
is imparted to us ; the greater the genius, the 
more deeply his fountain drinks of the tides 
of the common humanity. And it is genius 
alone that knows to stir in us those truths, 
emotions, impulses, that are wrought into our 
inmost being by the long race experience. We 



Principles of Criticism 161 

are seldom thoroughly awake and alive. Like 
the little fitful spire of violet flame that we 
sometimes see hovering and playing over the 
surface of a coal fire, so our consciousness plays 
about the different tracts of the otherwise dor- 
mant mind : now here, now there ; now sensa- 
tion, now memory, now one or another of the 
emotions, starts for the instant into fluttering 
life, then darkens back into unconsciousness. 
What we desire is the glow and illumination 
of the whole spirit ; and it is art, and espe- 
cially the literary art, that best ministers to this 
desire. 

It is not enough that a picture or a novel 
or a poem should move us : the question is, 
What does it move in us ? How much of the 
whole possible range of our inner life does it 
awaken } Nor is mere intensity of impression 
any sufficient test. For one must inquire, 
Whither does this tend, — toward further re- 
newal of full existence, or toward reaction and 
stagnation? Some feelings are kindled only 
to smoulder away and leave dead ashes on an 
empty hearth within the spirit ; others tend to 
kindle on and on, awakening thought, rousing 
to vigorous action. Nor are the most easily 
moved activities always the most important 
ones in the effect of art and literature. Laugh- 
ter and tears lie on the surface of the mind : 



162 Literature and Criticism 

the gleam and the dusk may interchange 
quickly at any passing cloud. It is the great 
motive powers deep down in the soul that most 
contribute to abounding life, and whose awak- 
ening most surely proves the presence of gen- 
ius : the sense of right and justice ; the feel- 
ings of pity, awe, aspiration ; love, too, — not 
the sodden sort of love, which is dear to the 
decorative poets in their maudlin moods, but 
mother-love, and father-love, and menschen-liebe, 
and love of friend, and lover's love, that de- 
sires not selfish possession, but the infinite 
welfare of its object, and for this will die or 
will live. 

The test, then, for literature, as for all art, 
is its life-giving power. In the essay, for ex- 
ample, perfection would consist in giving us, 
through that free and unpremeditated play of 
the whole bevy of spiritual faculties (which is 
the characteristic of this literary form), the 
widest excursions possible to the mind's lighter 
and leisure hours. In the novel, it would con- 
sist in imparting to us profound life-truths, 
pure emotions, noble intentions, in connection 
with the opportunity to re-live, or live in im- 
agination, the most significant experiences of 
human existence. In the poem, the require- 
ment is that it shall be full of lovely images, 
that it shall be in every way musical, that it 



Principles of Criticism I63 

shall bring about us troops of high and pure 
associations, — the very words so chosen that 
they come " trailing clouds of glory " in their 
suggestiveness ; and in its matter, that it shall 
bring us both thought and feeling, for whose 
interminghng the musical form of speech alone 
is fitted ; and that, coming from a pure and 
rich nature, it shall leave us purer and richer 
than it found us. 

Wordsworth said a profound thing, and said 
it very simply, as he knew how to do, when he 
gave as the criterion of a book that " it should 
make us wiser, better, or happier." And if it 
be the greatest sort of book, will it not do ail 
three ? 



A PRIVATE LETTER 

Berkeley, August 21, 1880. 
My dear Fellow Being (for really that is 
the only relation that gives me any right to 
address you), — I was reading a story of yours 
the other day in a certain magazine, and was 
struck by a little mistake in grammar that you 
contrived to repeat a good many times. I 
knew you were a young writer, and it was plain 
that you were one of great promise ; and it 
seemed to me a pity that a pen capable of such 
touches of the genuine literary power should 
slip into bad English, especially into a mistake 
so uninterestingly common, so newspapery, as 
it were, — a sin without any tang of eccentri- 
city to spice it. Of course I feel a painful deli- 
cacy in convicting you of bad grammar, and I 
could n't think of speaking to you publicly 
about it. I would n't for the world have any- 
body know I meant you, not even yourself — 
for certain. That is why I write thus privately 
to you about it. Not that mistakes in gram- 
mar are such blood-curdling things, in them- 
selves, but there is this harm in them : they 



A Private Letter 165 

catch the attention and so distract one's mind 
from the real matter in hand. Have you ever 
noticed how, when the eloquent B-an-rges is 
preaching, sometimes in the most impressive 
passage an unfortunate mispronunciation hits 
your ear and throws the whole train of thought 
and emotion off the track ? Just so, my dear 
friend (for I begin to feel very good-natured to 
you now that I am in the way of being abusive 
— there is a great deal of human-nature in 
people), when I was reading your charming 
story, just as my feelings were beginning to 
kindle in that passage, you know, where — for 
the first time — with — suddenly this gram- 
matical blunder exploded under my rapt atten- 
tion with a bang, and scattered my emotional 
tension to the winds. 

Besides, there is the terrible i7iference. Don't 
you know how a bad slip in the refinements of 
English syntax, coming from some newly intro- 
duced person, and coming, too, with the fatal 
smoothness of habitual use, opens up to you 
in a second whole vistas of inference and of 
undesirable probabilities for an acquaintance t 
Just so you will be sending a manuscript some 
day to the Coastian, or the Scribbler's Maga- 
zine, or the Ocean Monthly; and the editor will 
pick it up from a two-bushel basket of such, 
and his eye, flaming with the preternatural fires 



166 Literature and Criticism 

of haste and intellect, will snatch at a page or 
two of your trembling and otherwise innocent 
darling, and will pounce on this identical sole- 
cism. It will be enough for him ; for the power 
of inference must needs be swift and savage in 
a hurried editor in prolific literary regions. 

But you are impatient to know what all this 
is about. It is about the improper use, yea, 
the inveterate snarling up and inextricable en- 
tanglement of the uses of shall and will^ should 
and would. "Oh," you say, "is that all ! Why, 
everybody makes mistakes in them.^^ No, in 
fact, not everybody. You will find that our 
best writers never use these little auxiliaries 
improperly. Indeed, it is the absolutely per- 
fect discrimination between such words, the 
subtle sense of the least delicate flavor or 
ethereal aroma of difference between such im- 
palpable significations, that gives one charm to 
their style. I admit, on the other hand, that 
occasionally the particular auxiliaries in ques- 
tion are maltreated by otherwise respectable 
writers. It is, in fact, an Hibernicism that has 
crept into use, in this country particularly. But 
it will be well for you and me to remember that 
only old and successful authors can afford to 
write badly. 

Suppose, then, that once for all we look into 
this matter, and know the rights of these four 



A Private Letter 167 

small words. It is not difficult, but it will re- 
quire a bit of research into English grammar. 
You hate grammar, I suppose ? That is right. 
I never knew any one to love it : at least the 
thing that goes under that name in the schools. 
Of course no one can help liking the real study 
of grammar, the science of the subtlest work- 
ings of the human mind dealing with the sym- 
bols of expression; but few schoolboys ever 
get a taste of that. They are dragged by the 
ear through such text-books as that of G — Id 
Br — n, and forever after hate every person and 
everything that was ever associated with the 
subject, — the desk at which they recited it, 
and the smell of the particular flower that came 
in at the window where they tried to learn it, 
and the teacher that drove them mad with the 
reiteration of its meaningless maunderings. 
You will hardly believe it, but there really 
are, though, of late, several grammars written 
by scholars, intelligible, sensible, delightful 
books. (Of course the School Boards have 
not introduced them : they only consider the 
bindings of books and their relative cheap- 
ness.) Such, for instance, are Professor Whit- 
ney's " Essentials of English Grammar " and 
Professor Bain's " Higher Grammar." 

We will begin, then, by trying to forget all 
about the " potential mood " and other devices 



168 Literature and Criticism 

of Satan, found in the ordinary grammars, and 
go back to the origin of these four little " use- 
ful troubles," shall and should, will and would. 
You know that a thousand years ago, in good 
King Alfred's time, the English people spoke 
our mother tongue in the form which we now 
call Anglo-Saxon, but which they themselves al- 
ways called "Englisc," — "English," as it really 
was, only without the later accessions from 
the French, Latin, etc. In this original form 
of English the primitive verb had (besides our 
familiar imperative, infinitive, and participle) 
only two moods : the indicative, to express a 
fact (as, "/ was there^^) ; and the conditional 
(or subjunctive), to express an idea of a fact, 
merely conceived in the mind (as, '"'' if I were 
there ^^). In the indicative, or fact mood, the 
tenses (there were only two, present and past ; 
as, a77i and was) meant time ; in the subjunc- 
tive, or idea mood (since mere mental concep- 
tions are not tied up to time), they only meant 
different relations of doubtfulness (as, '• if ever 
I be a king,'^ or, '''' if I were king at aiiy time "). 
Take, for example, the statement of fact, " // is 
wrong ;''^ this is the indicative mood, and the 
present tense means present time, to-day. Or, 
" if it is wrong, he is not aware of it ; " this, 
also, is the indicative mood, in spite of the 
" if' because, although we do not assert it as 



A Private Letter 169 

a fact, we assume it to be a fact, for the time 
being, as you see by the conclusion ; and ac- 
cordingly the present tense means present time, 
as before. But suppose we say, ^'' if it be wro?ig^ 
he will not do it." This, you see, is the sub- 
junctive mood, expressing a mere idea, as be- 
ing possibly true ; and the present tense does 
not mean time (it is future time, if anything), 
but mere contingency. Again, take the state- 
ment, ''''he was wrong ;^^ it is indicative mood, 
stating a fact, and the past tense means past 
time, yesterday. Or, ^'' if he was wrojig^ he has 
probably discovered it ; " this, also, is the in- 
dicative mood, in spite of the " ?/^" because 
we assume the fact to exist, as the conclusion 
shows ; and accordingly the past tense means 
past time. But suppose we say, *' even if he 
were wrongs he would not discover it." This, 
plainly, is the subjunctive mood, expressing a 
mere supposition ; and the past tense does not 
mean past time — indeed, it may refer to any 
other time whatever except the past. What, 
then, does it mean ? Do you not see that it 
means to throw the idea still farther away from 
reality than the present tense would do, imply- 
ing that, while his being wrong is a supposi- 
tion, it is an improbable supposition ? And 
what more suitable for this meaning than to 
push it back into the past, where there can be 



1 70 Literature and Criticism 

no " if " or peradventure about things at all ; 
where (as an old saying runs) " 't is as 't is, 
and 't can't be any 't is-er." 

At this point, my dear young novelist (for 
that is what you are coming to, if the fates per- 
mit), you are beginning to suspect that you 
have been basely deceived. You began to 
read my letter with the alluring expectation of 
something genial if not absolutely frolicsome, 
and here we are in the thorny wilderness of — 
(we will not speak the loathed word) — the 
study that "teaches the art of speaking and 
writing the English language correctly." (As if 
it really ever did that ! When everybody knows 
that that art, if learned at all, is learned at the 
breakfast-table, and the mother's knee, and 
what we Californians still, by poetic license, 
call the " fireside." Then, what is the use of 

all this long ? (Yes, I know you are 

calling it that.) Because there are really a few 
idioms in our much Hibernicized, and Scotti- 
cized, and Gallicized, and Missouriated, and 
Downeastercized mother tongue that cannot be 
known with perfect confidence without going 
to the very roots of the matter.) 

Know, then, that shall and will were two 
Anglo-Saxon verbs {shall being of the form 
sceal, just as our word ship was originally scip, 
with the c pronounced as k). These were not 



A Private Letter 171 

auxiliary verbs, but genuine independent verbs ; 
''He wille " meaning ^'' I wish,'' or " I determine ^^^ 
and ^Hc sceal" meaning ^^ I owe,'' or ^^ I otighi.'" 
In the Anglo-Saxon version of the Parable of 
the Unjust Steward, the question, " How much 
owest thou ? " is rendered " Hit micel scealt 
thU?" This signification lasted to Chaucer's 
time, v/ho writes, " that faith I shall to God." 
And Mr. Earle (in his " Philology of the Eng- 
lish Tongue ") says that in one of the old coun- 
try dialects a child would still say, if asked to 
run of an errand, " I will if I shall ; " i. e. " I 
am willing to if I ought to." 

These two verbs, to shall and to 7vill, natu- 
rally came to be used very often with the in- 
finitive mood (i. e. the noun form) of other 
verbs, this infinitive being the object of the 
mental act of shalling or willing (owing or wish- 
ing). For example, " ic wille leornian Englisc " 
meant " / will to learn (or, I will the learning 
of) English^ Just so with shall ; " ic sceal 
leornian " meant " / owe the learning^^ or, " I 
ought the to-learnt 

You see, therefore, the fundamental dis- 
tinction between these two words (and it gov- 
erns every case of their apparently arbitrary 
use). Shalling involves the idea of influence 
or pressure or obligation, from without ; willi7ig 
involves the idea of self-determination, from 



172 Literature and Criticism 

within. This would be, if possible, still more 
evident, if I dared to ask you to plunge one 
fathom deeper into the inky sea of historical 
grammar ; for the oracles of these abysmal 
regions tell us that the present s/iall is itself 
the past tense of an original old fossil verb 
sculajt, meaning "to get in debt." (Grimm 
says, from an ancient present with the meaning 
" to kill ; " the past tense meaning, therefore, 
*' I have killed, and have to pay the legal 
fine.") The past tense signified, then, " I have 
got in debt," i. e. " I am under the pressure 
of an external obligation," or, " I owe." You 
perceive, now, the absurdity in the Hiberni- 
cism, " I will be obliged to refuse your re- 
quest;" for this means, "I wish, or will, to 
be obliged to refuse it." What we desire to 
express is our being under the outside pressure 
of circumstances; so we say, properly, " I shall 
be obliged." 

But, you understand, in such an example as 
this last, where hardly anything but mere fu- 
turity is expressed, we are outrunning the Anglo- 
Saxon usage. It was only in later times that 
this grew up. You can see how, since willing 
to do an act, and feeling a pressure to do an 
act, are both likely to result in the future doing 
of it, there would come about a habit of ex- 
pressing mere future expectation by these com- 



A Private Letter 173 

binations. And it soon came to be felt as an 
instinct of courtesy, in expressing a future act, 
to speak humbly in the first person, as if about 
to do it because of outside pressure, — "I shall 
do it," while the second and third persons are 
politely represented as doing it of their own 
free will, — *' you will," or " he will," do it. 
For instance, " I shall pay my just debts " is as 
if one said, " not that it 's any virtue in me, 
but I must ; " while " you will pay your just 
debts," implies that of course you wish to, and 
would, whether compelled or not. 

There are two apparent exceptions, but they 
are really only further illustrations of this 
original meaning of the words : in the inter- 
rogative form, we use ^'' shaW^ for the second 
person, because ^'' wilV^ would ask for consent 
or a promis'e ; and in quotation we use " shalV^ 
for all persons, because the person is repre- 
sented as speaking and saying, in the first 
person, "I shall." 

So much for expressing mere futurity ; but 
of course where determination is to be ex- 
pressed, the case is just reversed. Here the 
first person says, " I will^^ and the second and 
third are represented as dominated by this out- 
side determination, — "you shall do it," "he 
shall do it." (By the way, the phrase, " I 
won't^'' is such an exceedingly valuable one. 



174 Literature and Criticism 

morally, that it is worth noting here that this 
is an abbreviation of a good old form, " I wol 
not.") 

And now shall we briefly explore the matter 
of "should" and "would"? For to tell the 
truth, since this is a strictly private letter, and 
you don't even know that it is you I am talk- 
ing to, one may frankly say that in their usage, 
also, there were grievous wrongs. 

Mark you, then, this same " shall " had in 
Anglo-Saxon a past tense ^^ sceolde,''^ should; 
and "will" had a past tense ^^wolde,'" would. 
These, also, were at first not auxiliaries, but 
independent verbs, and meant as thus : " ic 
sceolde leornian,'^ " I owed it (yesterday) to 
learn ; " " ic wolde leornian,^^ " I willed the 
learning of it." The same forms were used 
in the past tense (so-called) of the subjunctive, 
but here was expressed not a fact, but the 
mere mental idea of a fact ; and the past tense 
meant not past time (future, rather if any- 
thing), but doubtfulness. And soon, just as 
shalling and wini?ig lost much of their inde- 
pendent meaning, and came to express mere 
futurity, so shoidding and wouldiiig came to ex- 
press merely doubtful or conditional futurity, 
and were used with other verbs as auxiliaries. 
The indicative past was lost, except in the 
single case of a statement like this : " He tried 



A Private Letter 175 

to prevent me, but / would do it" — where the 
past tense means past time, and the verb car- 
ries its original meaning. But the subjuiidive 
past is the one we use so commonly and some- 
times misuse so innocently. It occurs in con- 
ditional sentences, and the usage is different in 
the two clauses. For example, " If he should 
come, I should go." In the condition clause, 
the usage requires ^^ should" for all persons; 
in the conclusion clause, it requires '■^should" 
for the first person, '"'"would" for the second 
and third. That is to say, for any given per- 
son the same verb is used, in the present to 
express fact futurity (" / shall go, you will go, 
he will go"), and in the past to express doubt- 
ful futurity ("If it happened, I should go, you 
would go, he 7vould go"). The same reasons 
of courtesy apply to the distinction of persons^ 
as in the case of shall and will. 

Here, also, there are two apparent excep- 
tions : I. We say, " I would if I were you," or, 
"I wouldn't do that," using ^^ would" instead 
of ^^ should," because a flavor of its original 
meaning is what we require here, namely, wish 
or preference. And we say, " I would like to 
help you," using ^^ would" instead of ^^ should" 
for the same reason ; for we mean, " I should 
wish (to like) to help you (if there were any 
use of wishing)." Just so we say, " I would 



176 Literature and Criticism 

he were here," which differs from "I wish he 
were here " only as being subjunctive (shown 
by the fact that the past tense does not mean 
past time), and so expressing only a mere idea 
of wishing, like " I could wish he were here (if 
there were any use in it)." 2. We say, " You 
(or he) should do it," meaning "You ought to." 
Here, also, the original meaning of the word is 
introduced. Only one would expect the pre- 
sent tense ^^ shall ; " but this had already been 
appropriated for the future. Besides, there 
seems to be an instinct to throw this idea into 
the subjunctive past (or past of unreality and 
timelessness), as we see by the equivalent 
expression "he ought ^' (which is the past of 
" owe ") ; or, better still, by a colloquialism 
which pushes the idea still farther off into the 
past-past, or pluperfect, notwithstanding that 
the thought is still, if of any time at all, of 
future time, — " he V (he had) ought V do ity 

But at this point you will doubtless throw 
down this unoffending screed, with the ejacu- 
lation that you knew something about it before, 
but now you are all at sea. Well, that is the 
danger of a little knowledge. But, my dear 
friend, if you will go carefully through Pro- 
fessor March's Anglo-Saxon and Comparative 
Grammar, and Professor Bain's Higher and 
his Composition Grammar, following them up 



A Private Letter 177 

with Professor Lounsbury's " History of the 
English Language," and will then confine your 
light reading for a year to the very best au- 
thors, rigorously eschewing all newspapers (ex- 
cept that exceedingly cultured and intellectual 
one whose editors may happen to be reading 
this remark), I promise you that you will then 
begin to be ready to enjoy entering on the 
study of these things. 

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole mat- 
ter, in a practical table (and, now I think of it, 
you might skip what you have read up to this 
point, and begin here). 

For expressing mere futurity (the plural in 
all cases like the singular) : — 

I shall, 
You will, 
He will. 

For interrogation as to mere futurity : — 

[Am I going to ?] 
Shall you ? 
Will he ? 

For expressing determination : — 

I will, 
You shall. 
He shall. 

For expressing doubtful or conditional ideas 
(future or timeless), in the condition : — 



178 Literature and Criticism 

If I should, 
If you should, 
If he should. 

In the conclusion : — 

I should, 
You would, 
He would. 

For expressing wish or willingness or prefer- 
ence, in this softened, semi-conditional form; — 

I would (if I were you), 
I would (like to do it), 
I would (he were here). 

For expressing duty or obligation : — 

I should (study, but don't want to), 
You should, 
He should. 

Meantime, my dear young author, '''' quid re- 
fert Caio utnim^'^ etc., that is to say, what dif- 
ference does it make to Genius whether it 
speak precisely in the tongue of common mor- 
tals ? I know that, in point of fact, you will 
always enjoy writing, and I shall always enjoy 
reading your stories ; indeed, you shall go on 
writing them, and I will go on reading them, 
even though you should not use " would " as 
you should, or as you would if you should use 
" would " and " should " as Shakespeare or 
Mr. Matthew Arnold would. 




MANAGEMENT OF THE MIND WHILE 
HEARING MUSIC 

HAT is the best thing to do with the 
mind when listening to music ? " Do 
nothing with it," some one may reply ; 
" let it take care of itself." But this implies a 
mistaken idea as to its ways. It seldom does, 
in point of fact, take care of itself. It is bound 
to follow the successive suggestions either of 
certain outside impressions, or of certain inner 
impressions which also had originally an exter- 
nal source. One may as well choose a little 
among these. Surely we might better direct 
the mental panorama by some voluntary choice 
than to have it directed by the accidental sight 
of a grotesque face in the audience, or the odd 
bowing of some one of the second violins. Does 
it make the sailing of a summer sea any the 
less idly luxurious to touch the helm lightly 
from time to time ? 

Now there are several ways open to choice 
in the management of the mind's delicate 



/ 



180 Music 

steering apparatus, on such an occasion as the 
hearing of fine music. The worst way, no 
doubt, is to gaze fixedly at the performers, and 
so let the eye cheat the ear out of half its 
enjoyment. This is the besetting temptation 
of the " distinguished amateur," who is inclined 
to give his whole attention to the visible han- 
dling of whatever instrument he himself may 
happen to play. At a recent concert I noticed 
that my neighbor riveted his interest, during 
a whole splendid movement of the symphony, 
on the agile gymnastics of one of the double- 
basses. But this is not so ill-advised as the 
trick some people have of staring at a singer, 
and even with an opera-glass, during a whole 
song. What can they carry away in the mem- 
ory but a visual image of a wonderful openness 
of countenance, a kind of labio-dental display ? 
I have always liked to close my eyes during 
any passage of orchestral music to which I 
wished to lend special attention. It is sur- 
prising what sensitiveness and grasp this in- 
stantly gives to the auditory power. Some- 
times, in a dark corner under the gallery, one 
may indulge himself in the luxury. But on 
Kant's immortal doctrine that one should do 
only those things which all may do, this closing 
of the eyes at a concert hardly seems proper 
in the body of the house. Would it not look 



Management of the Mind i8i 

queer if we all sat that way? ("Look queer 
to whom, if everybody's eyes were shut?" 
Well, to the gentlemanly ushers; and the re- 
porters, whose eyes are always open ; and the 
cornet and the bassoon, in their lucid inter- 
vals.) It IS not necessary, however, actually 
to close the outward eye. We may select some 
peg on which to hang it, so to speak, where no 
distracting image will interrupt our reverie. 
The middle of the back of some quiet person 
m front of us will generally do. Or we may 
happen to have that convenient faculty, pos- 
sessed by so many, of fixing the bodily eye on 
a given point, while the mind's eye is gradually 
withdrawn leagues and leagues behind it. 

There are two opposite ways, in particular 
open to the mind for its excursions during 
music. It may either let itself become enga-ed 
m dreams of one's own personal destiny, mem- 
ories of the past, fantastically intermingled, or 
dreams of "what hath never been, and what 
can never be;" or it may go out of itself into 
the hfe-dramas of others. Which is the better 
way? For example, in listening to one of 
those orchestral duets of Rubinstein's, one may 
either disregard the composer's indication in 
the title, weaving his own personal episodes at 
will from the changes of the chords ; or he 
may occupy his imagination with the relations 



182 Music 

of the suggested Toreador and Andalouse j or 
he may hear only the far-off voices of well- 
known mortals and their perplexing fates ; or, 
finally, the music may but breathe an ethereal 
essence of human life universal, too elusive for 
any individual incarnation. The question is 
like that which confronts the poet : Shall he 
sing his own joys and woes, or shall he create 
exterior dramatic idyls? Shall he follow the 
method of Byron or of Browning ? 

"I am never merry," said Jessica, "when I 
hear sweet music ; " and her Lorenzo was no 
philosopher, and could give but the shallowest 
explanation of the fact. Rossetti's " Mono- 
chord," if she could have waited so long for it, 
might have helped her to a better one : — 

" Is it the moved air or the moving sound 
That is Life's self and draws my life from me, 

That 'mid the tide of all emergency 

Now notes my separate wave, and to what sea 

Its difficult eddies labor in the ground ? 

*' Oh ! what is this that knows the road I came, 
The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame, 
The lifted shifted steeps and all the way ? " 

No doubt it is the first instinct, with all of us, 
to let the "eternal passion, eternal pain," of 
great orchestral music interweave themselves 



Management of the Mind I83 

with the past, the possible, or, more often, 
the dear impossible, of our personal life-story. 
We are, for the time being, subjects of what 
Rossetti has noted, in his own private copy of 
the poem from which I have just quoted, as 
" that sublimated mood of the soul in which a 
separate essence of itself seems, as it were, to 
oversoar and survey it." But would it not be 
nobler in the soul if its survey were wider? 
Would it not be better for the will, in its renun- 
ciation and vows of service, that these inchoate 
worlds of musical harmony, these swaying 
tides of mysteriously organizing sound, an au- 
dible chaos of multitudinous emotions over 
which a creative breath is hovering and calling 
life, with all its tragedies and comedies, into 
being, should be identified to the imagination 
with the fates of other men than ourselves ? 

There are persons, I am beginning to dis- 
cover, who have but a very imperfect powder of 
visual imagination. An intimate friend writes 
me, after only three years of separation, " I 
have completely forgotten you. Or, rather, I 
remember nothing but you, and not at all your 
outward aspect. Face, form, manner, have alto- 
gether faded, and cannot by any effort of will 
be recalled." But I can shut my eyes and see 
this friend — form, features, color, a hundred 
particular ways of gesture and manner — more 



184 Music 

distinctly than any photograph could possibly 
present him. I could draw his profile on this 
paper ; not composing it, but simply tracing it 
from my mental image, as if it were a silhouette 
laid down and followed mechanically with the 
pencil. 

Those of us who possess this common enough 
power might at least always give some fitting 
7nise en seme to a symphony, removing it from 
its incongruous situation in an ugly hall packed 
with monotonous rows of frivolous bonnets 
and sand-papered heads. We do not need 
Wagner's aid to obliterate the musicians and 
fill the stage with impressive scenery. In a 
moment, at will, we are reclining in a stately 
pine forest on a solitary mountain-side. Be- 
hind us tower great crags with fluted columnar 
front, like nature's organ-pipes. Below and to 
the left hollows a piny gorge, blue with misty 
depth, up whose slope, from round the moun- 
tain's enormous flank, swells the sound of fall- 
ing torrents. Beyond the granite ridge to the 
right goes down a broken footpath to a hidden 
valley, where some momentous human passion 
play begins now to be enacted. 

Or we are drifting on the ocean, and a storm 
is subsiding. All night we have driven before 
the tempest, and now at the first glimmer of 
dawn we strain our sight into the darkness. 



Management of the Mind 185 

and listen for the roar of breakers. Suddenly 
the sound of all sweet and powerful instruments 
rises and mingles as if from the very depths 
of the rolling sea. Have the forces of nature 
become audible in their battling together ? Or 
have we drifted into the midst of a strife of 
mortal destinies, and is this the prelude to a 
mighty drama of the nations on the shores of 
some new world ? 



CAN TUNES BE INHERITED? 

I AM not a musician professionally, or in 
any strict sense of the word ; but I am fond 
of music, and, having a correct ear and some 
facility of touch, I have played on a good 
many instruments without acquiring much skill 
with any one of them. One musical endow- 
ment there is which might have been strong in 
me, if it had ever received any proper cultiva- 
tion : it is the power of composing tunes, of 
improvisation, on a very limited and unimpres- 
sive scale. Tunes make themselves in my 
head, — such as they are. When I " whistle 
as I go, for want of thought," it is neither clas- 
sical nor popular music, but such as makes 
itself as it goes along. It is very indifferent 
whistling, considered from the point of view of 
the " distinguished amateur " whistler, but un- 
consciously the tune, if " a poor thing, sir," is 
nearly always " my own." 

All this personality only by way of prelude 
to a curious fact. From about the age of 
twenty I have found more and more frequently 
coming into my mind a peculiar sort of tune ; 



Can Tunes he Inherited? 187 

a queer minor melody, like the Scotch, and yet 
not like the Scotch. Its angular yet taking 
wildness is more like the Irish tunes that one 
occasionally hears a genuine native Irish girl 
singing, or half humming, with unconscious 
pauses and sudden cresce7idos that follow the 
vicissitudes of her work. This habitual pre- 
sentation in the mind of these broken, waver- 
ing melodies, always on a half-fierce and half- 
pathetic minor key, had continued for some ten 
years when I made my first acquaintance, by 
chance, with the folk-music of the Welsh. It 
was on a Cunarder in mid-ocean, on the voyage 
to Liverpool. One evening I was loitering up 
and down the deck in the warm moonlight, 
when a group of steerage passengers, sitting or 
reclining about the foot of the foremast, began 
to sing in a low and half-unconscious strain in 
the midst of their talk. They were, it seems, 
Welsh people, who were choosing this particu- 
lar time to revisit the fatherland because of 
an approaching Eisteddfod, somewhere in South 
Wales. It was, I perceived instantly, the 
" music of my dreams." To the best of my 
knowledge and belief, I had never heard these 
tunes, or any such tunes, sung, w^histled, or 
played anywhere before. It had so happened 
that I had never lived in or near any Welsh 
settlements. I had never chanced to make the 



188 Music 

acquaintance of so much as one solitary Welsh 
person, so far as I know. Yet here, sung by 
these returning Cymric exiles in the yellow 
moonlight, as we rose and fell on the gently 
heaving waves, — here were the very strains 
that had for years been floating, unbidden and 
recognized, through my brain. I do not mean 
to say that the precise phrases and cadences 
were here. But the character, the musical 
moods and tenses, the tone-color, were the 
same. 

My explanation of the fact is simple, but to 
most will probably be incredible. I have Welsh 
blood in my family, far back on my mother's 
side. By some freak of heredity the music of 
my Welsh ancestors has come down through 
six, eight, or ten generations, as a dormant 
germ, and come to life again — a dim, somno- 
lent, imperfect life, to be sure — in a corner of 
my brain. I could almost fancy (though this 
I do not soberly believe, for it is explicable in 
other ways) that there has come down with it 
a visual picture of wild torchlight marchings 
and countermarchings in savage Welsh glens. 
So plainly do I see in my brain, ever since 
that night on the steamer, and especially ever 
since the corroboration of that instantaneous 
recognition through a collection of Cymric 
songs which I afterward obtained, visions that 



Can Tunes he Inherited? 189 

befit this strange, barbaric music. I see moun- 
tain gorges at night, black-clad in stunted and 
leaning trees, under a wild sky, where an un- 
shapely waning moon dives among scudding 
rags of storm. Winding along the pass comes 
a procession of my Keltic ancestors : it is a 
burial, or some savage midnight gathering 
against the Saxon invader. Red torches flare 
in the midst of their flying smoke ; some indis- 
tinct dark mass is borne among the leaders ; 
and now and again there are metallic gleams 
along the vanishing line. They are small, 
dark men, half clothed in skins of beasts, and 
their wild eyes shine under streaming locks of 
black hair. A mountain stream beside them 
flashes its white bursts of foam out of the 
darkness under the crags, and continually 
there rises and mingles with its roar that fierce 
yet woeful music, half shouted and half sung. 



INDIVIDUAL CONTINUITY 



HE continuity of our lives is not so 
great as we are apt to suppose. We 
have in youth a vivid sense of our con- 
tinuous individuality, and we take it for granted 
that it will always be so with us. Thus we 
hear with some incredulity the anecdotes of 
eminent men who have completely lost the 
recollection of certain things done, said, or 
written in early life, and, what is more, all in- 
terest in them, or desire to remember them. 
That Lowell can have forgotten, as the itemizer 
says, that he was once a contributor to the 
"Dial " seems incredible to a college Junior of 
my acquaintance. He has never forgotten any- 
thing he has written ! In like manner, to have 
a bosom friend at fourteen, and come to care 
next to nothing about him at forty, appears to 
the boy a shocking piece of treason. Little he 
knows how many breaks are likely to occur in 
the succession of his life-phases ; and how 
many times the winged creature will lightly 



Individual Continuity 191 

slip his feet out of the chrysalis shell, carrying 
only some invisible thread of half-memory over 
from one epoch into the other. 

No doubt there are lives that do go on with 
comparatively unbroken coherence, — tranquil, 
rustic, or village lives, whose sun always rises 
over the same horizon, and whose radii of in- 
terests, from year to year, go out to the same 
unchanged circumference. Here the constantly 
overlapping continuity of the neighborhood 
existence helps to keep the man's own thread 
of personality unbroken. But when we once 
cut loose from geography, make friends and 
break with friends, become the very opposite 
of " Bourbons " in that we are always " learn- 
ing" and always "forgetting," then how far 
backward over our days can the uninterrupted 
" I " be fairly said to extend ? When 

" some divinely gifted man, 
Whose life in low estate began 
And on a simple village green," 

at last "breaks his birth's invidious bar," and 
passes on to new desires, new opinions, at last 
a whole background of new memories, even, 
can it any longer be said to have been really 
he who 

" played at councilors and kings 
With one that was his earliest mate, 



192 Psychology and Ethics 

Who ploughs with pain his native lea, 

And reaps the labor of his hands, 

Or in the furrow musing stands : 

* Does my old friend remember me ' " ? 

In the early summer morning I see what 
appears to be a long silver line bending and 
glancing in the air between the fir and the 
apple-tree. But when I look closely, it proves 
to be a succession of infinitesimal globules of 
gray dew, strung on an invisible spider-line. 
Is our personality such a succession of sep- 
arately sphered moments or hours ? And what 
is the continuous line on which they are 
threaded ? With one, it may be some persist- 
ent purpose, — an ambition or a passion j 
with another, the abnegation of an ambition or 
a passion, or some inveterate trouble that is 
the last to look in on him at night and the first 
in the morning, and by means of which he has 
no difficulty in self-recognition. 

It is perhaps a mere fancy that mirrors have 
something to do with the distinct and ever- 
present sense of our own identity. If a man 
had never looked at himself in a glass, and so 
had no clear mental image of how he looked 
yesterday, and the day before, and a year ago, 
would he, for example, feel so intensely as now 
this irrational need of being consistent with his 
own past? It is not merely that we "cannot 



Individual Continuity 193 

escape from our grandfathers j " but we cannot 
escape, either, from our own last year. Was 
the primitive man, unsophisticated by French 
plate mirrors, freer for new growths ? Or did 
even Adam contemplate his aboriginal counte- 
nance in some smooth inlet of the river Pison, 
and so acquire an obstinate sense of respon- 
sibility for his earliest Adamite impressions ? 

And (while we are speculating a little freely) 
shall we go to the length of saying that possi- 
bly the mere accident of clothing counts for 
something in the case ? It may then be safest 
that a man renew his garments only piecemeal ; 
or, if he assume a complete new suit at a time, 
let him retire often into the linking familiarity 
of the second-best. With no mirror-image and 
no reminder from wonted clothes, would not a 
man sometimes need the evidence of " the little 
dog at home, and he knows me," to be sure 
that "I be as I think I be".? It may well 
be doubted whether all of us have positive in- 
dividuality enough to hold the steady recogni- 
tion of even our nearest relatives, without the 
visible tag of some familiar cut or color of gar- 
ment, or, at least, of that innermost garb or 
mask which is the bodily face and form itself. 

How much, moreover, has the mere circum- 
stance of our always carrying the same name 
to do with our sense of continuity .? As I look 



194 Psychology and Ethics 

over my old letters, here is the too familiar 
address on all the faded envelopes ; these cer- 
tainly, you would say, were addressed to very 
me. But when I open one to read, it seems 
to me it can hardly have been " I " who wrote 
the juvenilities to which these things are in 
response. It was another being to whom they 
came fresh from the mail, — 

" Like letters unto trembling hands ; " 

another being who read them with the eager- 
ness and responsive thoughts that I do now 
certainly seem to remember — by some strange 
witchcraft or self-substitution, like that of Si- 
gurd and Gunnar upon the Flaming Heath — 
almost as if they had been my veritable own. 
He bore my name, drew checks with my signa- 
ture, even went scf far as to pay my bills, — 
that person in the past. But in any other 
sense I am hardly prepared to own him as my 
actual and continual self. I rather look upon 
him as the chick upon the eggshell, the moth 
upon the cracked cocoon, the man at the mi- 
croscope upon the film of protoplasm, with the 
musing consciousness, " Such as thou art, once 
was I." 

Since we actually go through these meta- 
morphoses in life, it would be a significant and 
appropriate act, if only it were permitted us, to 



Individual Continuity 195 

shed our names from time to time. The other 
day, when I suddenly awaked once for all from 
an old nightmare of illusion, why might I not 
then and there have moulted to the extent of 
my name ? Or that hour when I flung aside a 
particular opinion which had long ridden my 
mind's shoulders, like an Old Man of the Sea, 
why should there not have gone with it the 
designation of the being whose life had been 
thus spoiled, letting the new man start with a 
new heraldic device ? Something of this sort, 
it is true, does happen when a person throws 
off his early nickname, and assumes the toga 
virilis of the full combination of baptismal 
titles through which his parents have made 
him imposing or ridiculous to the ear ; and at 
last, it may be, adds the initials of dignity by 
which his college or his church has ministered 
to his vanity. " Dicky " becomes " Dick," and 
then full " Richard," and then " the Reverend 
Doctor," or " the Bishop," or " the ex-Vice- 
President." These developments are but the 
outward and audible symbols of mysterious 
inner transformations. The ex-Vice-President, 
bald now, glazed (if that be a proper term for 
the taking on of spectacles) and wise, would 
no more wish to be held responsible for the 
views he expressed in youth than he would 
chirp and twitter again at the charms of the 



196 Psychology and Ethics 

"girl he left behind" him, or answer to the 
maternal or sororal call of " Dicky." 

More than this it would perhaps not be safe 
to permit to us in the way of escape from our 
proper labels. It is necessary that society 
should hold us to a strict accountability for 
our successive selves, and the name is the rope 
by which these are held together. The world 
must keep track of us, like a great police. 
Nature, besides, has us all down in her rogue's 
gallery ; for our face is photographed in a thou- 
sand watchful eyes, as well as our name in so 
many ears. 

Something of our restlessness in flitting from 
place to place may be accounted for by this in- 
stinctive craving to let the new and different 
man that we feel is in us^ or might be in us, 
begin life all over again in a different place. 
At last we shall be permitted to do it, but not 
prematurely. We dodge to Dresden or Geneva, 
but we are there at the station to receive our- 
selves. Ccelum, non animum, we find that we 
have changed. The old lives have managed to 
creep stealthily in our shadow, and soon they 
accost us at every street corner with ironical 
congratulations at our escape from them, in the 
new city as in the old. 

Are there not lapses or gaps in the conti- 
nuity of our conscious existence, of which we 



Individual Continuity 197 

may ourselves, by a little close attention, be- 
come aware ? To begin with, there is the gap 
of nightly sleep, when the chain of conscious- 
ness, if it does not actually break off, at least 
sags under water and is lost to the eye for a 
space, to emerge glimmering with vague dreams 
into the sunshine of the waking hour. If the 
figure appears strained, it is because I am 
thinking of the early spring mornings in boy- 
hood, when we used to go to the Little River 
to take up the gill-net for shad. A mist hung 
on the smoothly running water ; there was an 
"Oriental fragrancy" of spearmint from the 
moist bank ; the rattle of the oar in the row- 
lock sounded preternaturally loud, echoing un- 
der the covered bridge at that perfectly silent 
hour. When we boys begin to lift the strained 
top line of the net, pulling the skiff along by 
means of it, it is a moment of delicious excite- 
ment. What is that dim spot of glimmering 
gold, far down in the dark water? It grows, 
as we eagerly haul on the line, and the little 
waves plashed out by the boat make it waver 
and break, till it seems some huge and splendid 
prize, like the mysterious casket in the net of 
the Arabian fisherman. So memory, puHing in 
the line of submerged consciousness after pro- 
found sleep, catches sight of vague gleams of 
wonderful experiences. 



19S Psychology and Ethics 

But frequently, even in waking hours, I have 
seemed to detect lapses of conscious conti- 
nuity. I look up, for example, from writing, 
and my eye turns to the window, and sight ancl 
attention seem to exhale, as it were, or evapo- 
rate into open space ; thought ceases ; for five 
seconds I am not a mind, I am a vegetable. 
Or in walking over some beaten track up and 
down in my garden, I have sometimes found 
myself at the other end of my beat, without 
having noticed anything, or thought of any- 
thing in particular, on the way. It has several 
times happened to me, in using my " home- 
exerciser " and giving to each pulley movement 
my accustomed forty counts, that I find myself 
at twenty-five or thirty, when I seemed only to 
have just counted twelve or fifteen. Now did 
I simply skip the intervening numbers, or did 
the unconscious brain cells go on automatically 
counting across a gap of that extent in my con- 
scious existence ? Suppose I had " died," as 
we call it, during that interval : what would 
have gone on into immortality, the conscious- 
ness or the gap ? 

But in truth this whole matter of the indi- 
vidual identity — the I-ness of the 1 — is thick 
with difficult questions. Here is my old apple- 
tree, for instance : is it a tree, or a thousand 
trees using one common bole ? Every bud on 



Individual Continuity 199 

it is in reality a separate, individual being ; 
as we may easily prove by setting it off by it- 
self in some chink of another tree, where the 
sap of life shall come to it duly. Or in the 
case of a bunch of polyps, or of vorticels, on 
one stalk, how much of the cooperative life is 
entitled to say " I," and where does the we- 
ness of the we begin ? If we are to count the 
whole tree, with its multitude of separate or 
separable lives, as only a single individual, how 
would it be with us if the human offspring were 
never wholly separated from the life-sustaining 
parent ? Or would it strain our sense of iden- 
tity at all, if the entire change of the substance 
of the body, popularly supposed to take place 
every seven years, should no longer occur grad- 
ually, cell by cell, but by a sudden cataclysm, 
some fine morning ? As the old bone and tissue 
left him, and the new were clapped on in their 
place, would not the man have to jump to tie 
on the thread of new memory at the vanishing 
end of the old, lest he lose himself before he 
had time to find himself ? 

There is an old story they tell in the country 
that always seemed to me to have occult and 
esoteric meanings ; as it were a kind of myth 
that had been builded better than was known, 
or else a survival from the folk-lore of some 
lost race of speculative mound-builders. The 



200 Psychology and Ethics 

tale is of an old farmer who was driving a 
yoke of oxen in an empty cart, and who yielded 
gradually to the sweet influences of a jug by 
his side, and fell fast asleep. The leisurely 
oxen having presently sauntered into the grass 
by the roadside, some humorous passer-by 
found them feeding there and turned them 
loose, leaving the peaceful sleeper snoring in 
the sun. By and by he awakened, sat up, 
rubbed his eyes, and slowly soliloquized : ^^ Am 
I, or am I not I ? If I am I, I have lost a good 
yoke of oxen. If I am not I, I have found a 
good cart ! " 



WHAT DO WE MEAN BY "RIGHT" 
AND "OUGHT"? 

The writer wishes to make only the prefatory remark 
that he puts forward no claim to the discovery of any 
new basis for morals. His effort is merely to bring 
more clearly into the light what seems to him to have 
been all along (in actual fact) the basis, and to have 
this more clearly recognized as such. While the sub- 
stance of his essay was written, and propounded to a 
limited circle, before the publication of Herbert Spen- 
cer's " Data of Ethics," it comes —from a different point 
of view — to results in harmony with that work. Nor is 
this strange, since the writer had been familiar with Mr. 
Spencer's previous writings, and had no doubt been 
greatly indebted to him in all his later thinking on the 
subject. 

In attempting to find a solid basis for mor- 
als, ethical writers have too much neglected 
the simple question of fact. They have asked 
what we ought to mean by " right," and what it 
is right to understand by " ought," but these 
questions lead into fog. What we need first 
of all to know is, What do we, in fact, mean 
by these words, as we use them from day to 
day ? Every one uses them. They are found 



202 Psychology and Ethics 

in different races, in connection witli all sorts 
of religious beliefs. They are applied every- 
where — and this is very significant — to sub- 
stantially the same classes of actions. It would 
be easy to point out these actions, and thus to 
show what these terms "right "and "ought" 
denote ; but it is not so easy to point out the 
precise qualities of actions by virtue of which 
we say that they are "right," and "ought" to 
be done, and thus to show what these terms 
connote, or what we mean by them. It is a 
question, not of metaphysics or speculative 
ethics, but of pure psychology. We shall find, 
if we investigate it, that we have already a solid 
basis for morals, and that what is needed is to 
bring it to clear recognition. We shall find 
that " right," as a quality of actions, has refer- 
ence to their consequences ; that when we say 
a thing is " right " we mean that it conduces 
to human welfare ; that the highest welfare is 
conceived to be that which Herbert Spencer 
describes in his " Data of Ethics " as " com- 
plete living." 

It will be best to take, for our analysis, a 
case in point. Suppose that A. is angry with 
B., and has a murderous impulse toward him. 
But the thought arises, " It is not right to kill 
him ; " "I ought not to kill him." 7'he two 
terms do not connote the same thing. Let us 



''Right'' and ''Ought" 203 

take them separately. First, what does he 
mean by " right " ? 

To begin with, A. does not need to stop to 
think of the moral aspect of this particular 
case of killing. He simply perceives that it 
falls in with a class of acts concerning which 
he has previously formed this judgment of 
"not right." In other words, he now only 
feels it to be " not right," by an instantaneous 
instinct. But how has this been formed ? 

There are certain adjectives, oftenest applied 
to concrete objects, and connoting impressions 
made directly on special senses. Such are 
blue, sweet, rough, etc. There are other adjec- 
tives, oftenest applied to actions, and connoting 
their results. Such are dangerous, benejicent, 
ruinous, etc. To which of these classes does 
" right " belong ? Does it express some qual- 
ity of an action that directly strikes a special 
sense, an " inner sense," comparable to the 
outer senses of sight, touch, etc. ? or does it 
express some character in the consequences 
likely to follow the action ? In other words, 
when A. says, " It is not right to kill B.," is 
he expressing an impression made directly on 
some special "sense of right," or a judgment 
as to consequences "i 

We must avoid one liability to error here : if 
a certain action has repeatedly been followed 



204 Psychology and Ethics 

by evil results, although the first judgment 
concerning it was plainly an estimate of conse- 
quences, it finally comes to seem a direct ver- 
dict of impression on an inner sense. For 
example, the action of thrusting the hand into 
boiling metal is declared so instantaneously to 
be dangerous that one feels as if the action re- 
quired no weighing of consequences, but as if 
some " sense of danger " immediately declared 
it dangerous. Originally, however, the child 
required a process of reasoning to apply this 
judgment as to its quality. And we again 
come back to the original need of reflection 
when we have learned that there are certain 
conditions under which the action is not at all 
dangerous, and once more the adjective really 
stands for the result of a process of reasoning 
as to the probable consequences of the action. 
In the same way, it is apparently the expres- 
sion of a direct impression on some " sense of 
right " when A. says, " It is not right to kill 
B." But if we go back to the period of child- 
hood, we find that originally this action of kill- 
ing made no such impression on the mind, — 
say in the case of killing animals. If it is true 
that children are ever born with this judgment 
(so to speak) that killing is not "right," it is 
probably the result of ancestral experience, and 
in no case amounts to more than some instinc- 



''Right" and ''Ought'' 205 

tive physical repugnance. It is safe to say 
that the time when the act of kilhng first seems 
clearly not " right " to the child, is the moment 
when he recognizes that certain evil results — 
punishment to himself, or pain and deprivation 
of life to the animal — follow the act. Here 
also, as in the case of plunging the hand into 
boiling metal, we come at last to find that kill- 
ing is sometimes right, as in the killing of ani- 
mals for food, or the judicial killing of men, 
and again the judgment (after having passed 
through a stage where it seems immediate, as 
if the verdict of a special sense) becomes again 
visibly a weighing of consequences. 

In examining the origin and growth of the 
idea of " right " in childhood (or what is very 
much the same thing, in undeveloped men), 
we find that the idea changes very greatly as 
the mind develops. Perhaps there could be 
no better test of the degree of development of 
men than the meaning of this word " right " to 
their minds, — not the denotation merely, or 
the designation of what actions are " right," 
but the connotation, or the quality in which 
their "rightness " is conceived to consist. In 
earliest childhood, as the mother expresses to 
the child her displeasure at certain acts, this 
displeasure, followed it may be by other pains, 
comes to be the prominent result of these ac- 



206 Psychology and Ethics 

tions to his consciousness. Conversely, certain 
actions become associated in the child's mind 
with the agreeable result of the parent's ap- 
proval, and perhaps reward. These he learns 
to consider '* right " actions. If, now, the fam- 
ily is an ordinarily religious one, the child 
learns also to expect the displeasure and pun- 
ishment of God from certain acts, his approval 
and reward from certain others. To a greater 
or less extent, also, he is taught — or learns by 
his own observation — to expect from actions 
a result in approval or disapproval from other 
people, at first in the household, and afterward 
in the outside world. " Right " comes, then, 
to signify to the child's mind a certain set of 
consequences to himself from parents, from 
God, from public opinion. 

But this is not all. From the beginning the 
child has what may be called sympathy, or the 
tendency to put himself in another's place. (It 
is seen even in the brute animals, at least in 
motherhood.) He feels the evil results of ac- 
tions to others to some extent as to himself. 
In other words, the consequences of actions 
come to be computed with reference to others, 
as well as to self. " Not right," in fine, comes 
to mean what will bring evil consequences to 
all. 

When, therefore, A. says to himself, " It is 



''Right" and ''Ought'' 207 

not right to kill B.," his consciousness con- 
tains, as the connotation of the word " right," a 
judgment as to the consequences of this action. 
It is a judgment so rapid, and its elements are 
so tangled together in vague combination, that 
it seems an instantaneous sense impression. 
But there are likely to lie in it the obscure 
remains of the teachings of childhood, the ap- 
prehension of parental, of divine, of public 
displeasure to himself, the sympathetic appre- 
hension of the resulting evil to B., and the 
perception (if he be a reflective man), how- 
ever general and rapidly swept together in 
consciousness, of universal harms to universal 
being. 

It is an interesting question, the answer to 
which throws some light on the explanation of 
the idea : How did this word " right " come 
to be selected in language to represent this 
idea 1 The original sense of the term, not in 
our own tongue only, is of straightness, as a 
"right line." "Wrong," also, is originally 
"wrung," or wrenched from the straight line. 
While we must beware of foisting into the 
mind at a given moment, in trying to analyze 
what it contains in using any word, too much 
of the original sense of it (for of this the mind 
at the moment may hold very little indeed in 
consciousness), yet the choice of a certain 



208 Psychology and Ethics 

word, in the growth of language, to represent 
a certain secondary idea, has always some sig- 
nificance. In this case the instinctive selec- 
tion of "right "and "wrong," — the straight 
and the crooked, — to stand for actions char- 
acterized respectively by good and evil conse- 
quences, seems to point to a perception that 
the straight line is the useful and convenient 
one on the whole. It is the line the results of 
which are, in the long run, most satisfactory. 
In building, in constructing, in traveling, in 
adapting means to ends in general, the straight 
is on the whole the successful. Out of all the 
endless variety of crooked lines, only a few 
are beautiful, only a few are useful. Number- 
less phrases involve this perception. The boy 
must " toe the mark." The account is " all 
straight." The man is " level-headed." Meth- 
ods are " crooked." We " straighten out " 
confusions. 

To the question, then, "What does the man 
mean by right ? " our answer is. He really 
means " productive of good consequences ; 
conducive to welfare." If it be asked, " whose 
welfare ? " the reply must be, It will depend on 
the grade of development of him who uses the 
word. It may in the consciousness be limited 
to self, it may be so wide as to include all. 

If one doubt that it is this estimate of con- 



" Right " and " Ought " 209 

sequences that determines for us whether ac- 
tions are right, let him notice how immediately 
we decide an action to be wrong — however it 
had been felt to be right before — the moment 
we are convinced that it will bring harm to all. 
When the Laureate makes Pallas say to the 
hesitating Paris : — 

" Because right is right, to follow right 
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence," 

we understand that the meaning is, it is wise 
to scorn momentary and merely personal con- 
sequences, in favor of those which are lasting 
and universal. Without the expectation of con- 
sequences of some sort, to some one, actions 
could have to us no quality of rightness or 
wrongness at all. 

But do all actions that are judged to be con- 
ducive to welfare bring with them the sense of 
their being " right " .'' A man puts on his shoes 
in dressing. The consequences of not doing 
so are distinct, yet he has no sense of right or 
wrong connected with the act. It is a mere 
question of prudence. Suppose he knew the 
leaving off his shoes would result in his not 
being able to walk to a certain point in time 
to win a suit which would secure to him an 
immense fortune .'' This increased amount of 
anticipated evil still does not give the act any 
tinge of moral quality to his mind, so far as 



210 Psychology and Ethics 

the consequences to self only are thought of. 
But the preventing another from having shoes, 
though it would only cause some slight pain, 
seems to him wrong. Still more the prevent- 
ing another from winning his fortune. 

Yet we have said that the very origin of the 
idea of " right " in the child's mind lies in the 
perception of consequences to himself. How 
is it, then, that it seems to be only when re- 
sults to others are involved that we pass from 
a perception of what is merely " prudent " to 
a felt quality of " Tightness " t Has the man 
merely transferred a name, applying now the 
term " prudent " to that quality of an action 
w^hich once he would have termed " right " ? 

No, not merely the name, but the idea con- 
tained in his consciousness is different. It is 
important to detect in just what this difference 
consists. In both cases the result is conceived 
only as regarding self. In the case of the 
child, where the idea seems fairly represented 
by the term "right," the result (the penalty) is 
conceived as coming from a person. In the 
case of the man, where the idea is represented 
by the term "prudent," the result is to come 
from impersonal forces of nature. Is it not 
the personality of the source of penalty that 
makes the difference ? Suppose that the man 
believed that if he left off his shoes God would 



''Right" and'' OugW 211 

directly punish him by making him ill. Now 
again it would seem to him a question of right 
and wrong. Suppose God were conceived to 
act unalterably and uniformly by unvarying 
laws, the illness coming now, not as a special 
adaptation to the individual case, but as the 
result of unchangeable conditions. Now it has 
become mere " prudence " again. Is it not, 
then, the element of uncertainty — the vague- 
ness of the expectation — that gives that tinge 
to the idea which makes us call it "right" in- 
stead of " prudent " ? If the child knows that a 
machine will invariably strike his hand when- 
ever he puts it on the wheel, he considers it to 
be " prudent " to avoid that action. If he knows 
that his mother will probably strike his hand if 
he puts it on the sleeping baby, he considers 
it "right" to avoid the act. Trying to grasp 
all that the consciousness contains in either 
case, can we see any difference between the 
two ideas except the definiteness and certainty 
of the expectation of pain in the one, the vague- 
ness and uncertainty in the other ? For the 
personal displeasure always introduces an in- 
calculable element into the .penalty. In other 
words, there is a sense of the authority of the 
parent, of God, or of public opinion, conceived 
as sources of penalty ; and this " authority " 
seems on analysis to yield only a sense of the 



212 Psychology and Ethics 

indefinite power — the unlimited possibility of 
producing consequences — in these beings. 

It is not necessarily in merely growing ma- 
ture in years that one reaches a higher devel- 
opment of the idea of right. No doubt many 
persons of mature age still have in their con- 
sciousness only some vague apprehension of 
penalties to themselves when they feel an act 
to be not "right." Perhaps it might some- 
times be found that a man considers an act not 
" prudent " when it threatens some slight and 
temporary damage to himself, and another act 
not " right " when to his belief it threatens him 
with everlasting torment. 

But in those minds which pass on to further 
development in growing older, the considera- 
tion of consequences to others more and more 
takes the place of this childish idea of "right." 
The consideration of consequences to self, 
from any source whatever, hardly gives to the 
idea concerning an act any flavor whatever of 
" rightness," but only a sense of its "pru- 
dence." It is only what would cause gener- 
ally harm that seems " wrong ; " it is only what 
conduces to the general welfare that seems 
*' right." 

But there is a higher idea than that of 
"right," as the mere correlative of "wrong." 
"Right" as ordinarily used means only what 



''Right'' and ''Ought'' 213 

we may do without doing wrong. The higher 
idea is that of " duty." This word means not 
what we merely J7iay do, but what we " ought " 
to do. Here again we see a development from 
a cruder to a more evolved morality. At first, 
whether in childhood, or in the childish period 
of nations, or in the permanent condition of 
unprogressive nations and persons, morality 
goes no farther than in the abstention from 
" wrong." Its precepts are only " Thou shalt 
not." But there comes later the sense of 
" duty." The aspiration is to do not only the 
right, but all the right one can as one's whole 
duty. The morality is based not on "Thou 
shalt not," nor even on "Thou shalt," but "I 
win." 

And what, now, is the true analysis of this 
further idea of " ought " ? We have said that 
it is not identical with the idea of " right " ; 
their denotation may be the same, but their 
connotation is different. When A. says, " It is 
not right to kill B., I ought not to do it," he 
really says two different things. The idea 
" ought " carries in his consciousness a more 
prominent flavor of the outside power com- 
pelling him by means of penalties. It is neces- 
sary, for any clear analysis, to consider the 
origi7i of this "ought" idea in the individual 
mind, since at any given moment it consists 



214 Psychology and Ethics 

partly of a residuum from previous stages of 
the idea, and cannot be completely analyzed 
without a view of these. 

When the child A. is about to take an orange 
that has been given to B., the mother makes 
him understand that the act would incur her 
displeasure and possibly other pains. He thus 
learns that the act would not be " right." Prcr 
sently he learns also that its evil consequences 
to B. are a part of its " wrongness j " by and by 
these perhaps constitute for him its chief wrong- 
ness. But he learns to feel at the same time 
the sense of his mother's outside compelling 
power upon him through the motive of her dis- 
pleasure and other penalties. " She obliges 
me (forces me through motives) not to do it," 
is his feeling. " I am under obligation, I ought 
not to do it." Moreover, by sympathy (which 
enters into training more than is ordinarily 
perceived), catching her feeling, he comes to 
feel toward himself, on occasion of such an act, 
as he has perceived her to feel toward him. 
So grows up self-reproof. From God, con- 
ceived as a higher parent, he comes to expect 
a similar displeasure ; and from public opinion 
still another. From the latter alone, indeed, 
the idea might spring up, in the case of a 
person growing up without parent or religious 
training. The mature man, therefore, is likely 



''Right" and ''Ought" 215 

to have in his consciousness as the " ought " 
idea a more or less confused mingling of the 
idea of the parental displeasure (possibly now 
a mere relic), of the divine displeasure (possi- 
bly also a relic), the displeasure of public 
opinion, and the displeasure of his own perma- 
nent, as against his momentary, self. 

In many minds of the present day it will 
furnish a clear illustration of the survival of 
relics of ideas in the moral consciousness to 
recall their own experience of the Sabbath- 
keeping precepts of childhood. If (as was 
true in the writer's case) the child was taught 
that the reading of "Robinson Crusoe" on 
Sunday was a wicked act, some vague idea of 
an "ought" connected with ordinary employ- 
ments on that day will be found to have sur- 
vived a long time beyond any acceptance of it 
by the mature reason. 

It is an interesting inquiry, again, how the 
word " ought " came to be used in the growth 
of our language. For the history of the use of 
a word throws a little (however uncertain) 
light on the development of the idea in the 
minds of our forefathers. The word appears 
in the earliest known form of the language as 
ah, meaning " I have, I own." (This present 
tense seems to have been, earlier still, the past 
of a verb signifying to labor; and to have 



216 Psychology and Ethics 

come to mean, therefore, " I have labored and 
earned, and so havey) " Ought " was the past 
tense of this ah, but took on the meaning of 
the present tense. It is important to notice 
that ah had originally in English the sense of 
" I own," not " I owe." The latter was a sec- 
ondary sense that grew up in the thirteenth or 
fourteenth century. From the sense of " I 
have," it came to be used with to as a kind of 
auxiliary verb : it appears about the year 1200 
as " / ah to don,'^ " I have to do," so and so. 
We can only grope here in conjectures, but the 
history of the idea seems to have been, " I 
have this thing to do ; " that is, " it has been 
given me to do," or " set for me to do." That 
is to say, " I otight, I am obliged (under obli- 
gation) to do it j " "I must do it, or something 
will happen to me." 

From its frequent occurrence in phrases 
with to, followed by a verb, like the above, it 
seems to have taken on the sense of " owe " in 
general. 

When, then, A. says, " I ought not to kill 
B.," his idea — so far as the history of the use of 
this word throws any glimmer of light upon it 
— is not based (as often seems to be supposed) 
on any sense of " owing " it to B., or to the com- 
munity, or the Deity; for the word was used 
to mean " ought " before it was used to mean 



''Right'' and "Ought" 217 

"owe." The etymology rather points to a 
basis in the sense of having a task imposed on 
him by an outside power, or by his own per- 
manent self with penalties. In other words, 
the phrase, " I owe him a dollar," came from the 
thought, " I /lave to pay him a dollar," and not 
vice versa. And the phrase, " I ought to do 
this," came from the thought, " I have to do 
this, I must do it," and not vice versa. 

Obligation, then, or the " ought," as a state 
of a person in relation to a proposed action, 
reduces under analysis to a liability to indefi- 
nite pains and penalties from some superior 
power, which thus compels him toward or from 
the act. And the connection of the idea 
" ought " with the idea " right " is consummated 
when we arrive at the conception of general 
ideas, and conceive of this superior power — 
parental, divine, public, or that of our own per- 
manent self — as acting in accordance with 
abstract "right," or that which conduces to 
general welfare. 

Thus we see that as fast as the conception of 
higher powers, with farther reaching penalties 
and rewards, comes in, the idea of the " ought " 
shifts its basis. At first the child's "ought" 
is based on the mandates of the parent, what- 
ever they be. When he becomes aware of a 
higher public law, the felt obligation of obedi- 



218 Psychology and Ethics 

ence to the parent is modified by this concep- 
tion. When, further, he perceives a law of 
abstract " right," higher still than the state, or 
his immediate public (as in the question of 
obeying a vicious law), his "ought" again is 
modified. At last he comes to say even of the 
Deity, " If he commanded me to do what was 
unjust, what was cruel, what was not right, I 
would not obey : " because he divines a total 
of things, concerned with consequences abso- 
lutely universal, which has now become in fact 
his Deity. It is the conception, as the poet 
embodies it, of *' the Quiet " overruling " Se- 
tebos." So that one's final "ought" is felt 
toward what is conceived as the hostility of the 
universe against evil, and its friendliness toward 
good. 

And here we reach our final question, so far 
as the theoretical discussion of the basis of 
morals is concerned. "Good," "welfare " — 
what do we mean by these words ? The 
" ought," we have said, in its highest develop- 
ment, becomes a perception of superior powers 
working for the good, i. e. the welfare, of all ; 
the "right," we have said, is such action as is 
perceived to be conducive to this good or wel- 
fare of all ; but what " good," what " welfare " ? 

Here again we arrive at a region of changing 
and developing standards. There are many 



" Right " and " Ought " 219 

words which remain the same, but represent 
different ideas in any individual mind at differ- 
ent stages of growth, or in different minds ; as 
a fossil wood retains its form, but new parti- 
cles replace the old. "Delightful," for in- 
stance, has a sufficient degree of identity of 
connotation to serve for that rude sort of ap- 
proximate communication between minds which 
makes up ordinary speech ; but the word really 
stands for many various and indeed contradic- 
tory ideas. Take, for instance, the common 
phrase, " a delightful book." How little it 
tells us concerning the book, unless we know 
who utters it. So of the words "good" and 
" welfare : " we begin perhaps by feeling that 
physical pleasure is the "good " thing. It is 
the conception of infancy, and of those minds 
that never pass beyond the infancy of the intel- 
lect. To such the " welfare " of a man would 
consist in being all one sensual nerve, and this 
perpetually gratified. But there develops grad- 
ually in the mind a perception that pleasures 
grade themselves into lower and higher. We 
rate the soul higher than the body, and we 
rate the satisfaction of the spirit higher than 
the gratification of the nerve. There arises the 
conception which we name "happiness." This 
idea, to be sure, is also various in various 
minds. But on the whole we seem to mean by 



220 Psychology and Ethics 

it at least some more permanent condition of 
satisfaction than any momentary "pleasure;" 
and on the whole it seems to stand, to any 
given mind, for the highest sort of satisfaction 
it knows. But, farther on, the idea of happiness 
itself rises. The word begins to seem inade- 
quate. It did, for example, to Thomas Carlyle, 
who substituted for it (in " Sartor Resartus ") 
the word " blessedness," meaning thereby a pos- 
session of higher satisfactions, more intellec- 
tual, more spiritual, than the term " happiness " 
— tarnished as it is by its use for mere animal 
pleasures — seemed able to express. Least 
of all do we now feel satisfied with the idea of 
C07ite7itment as constituting any worthy sort 
of happiness. " Contented ? " we say. "It is a 
mere negation of discontent. The swine is 
contented in his litter ; the mollusk is even 
more contented in his mud ; the lifeless stone 
is most contented of all." 

And at this point we begin to perceive the 
essence of the still further developing idea of 
welfare. If the stone's condition is, least of 
all, " welfare," if that of the mollusk is but a 
little better, and so on, what is this increas- 
ing element, as we go higher in the grade of 
existence, that approaches more and more our 
idea of real " good," real " welfare " ? It is 
nothing less than Being — conscious existence, 



''Right" and ''Ought" 221 

completeness of life. Why does intellectual plea- 
sure seem higher to us than animal pleasure ? 
Because it involves more of the man. Why did 
Carlyle's "blessedness" represent to him a 
higher idea than even the highest happiness ? 
Because it was more inclusive — because it 
expressed the life of the " Spirit," the feelings, 
the will, as well as of the dry intellect. The 
highest aspiration, then, comes to be that for 
increased totality of conscious life — in all the 
natural human powers, of body, mind, and 
spirit. Those courses of action — those move- 
ments of the thought or the feehng, even — 
which tend toward narrowing, belittling, dwarf- 
ing the man's nature, seem bad and degrading. 
Those actions and impulses seem lofty which 
tend toward broadening, deepening, fulfilling 
the stream of conscious life. We cry with the 
poet, — 

" 'T is life whereof our nerves are scant, 
Mo7'e life, znd fuller, that I want." 

And we feel it to be the highest promise he 
could make when Jesus declared, — 

" I am come that they might have life, and 
that they might have it more abmtdantly." 

And this brings us, from a different stand- 
point, to Spencer's conclusion in the " Data of 
Ethics." 
. At the same time with this progress in the 



222 Psychology and Ethics 

idea of welfare, of the thing most to be desired, 
there is a parallel progress in the idea respect- 
ing the persons for whom we most desire it. 
We begin by craving it for self. Little by little 
the desire broadens itself, for each of the higher 
forms of good in turn to include as its recipi- 
ents one's family, one's friends, one's race, one's 
universe. The highest welfare, the greatest 
good, the siwimum botium^ is at last, in our con- 
ception, the attainment of the highest possible 
grade of development — the conscious posses- 
sion of the most complete possible existence 
— by all beings. And by "right" we mean 
what promotes this ; and by " wrong " we mean 
what frustrates this. And that which we feel 
we " ought " to do is that toward which we 
feel that the universal powers compel us by 
motives of these recognized consequences to 
all. 

If any system of religious ethics has held up 
to men the idea of physical pleasure as the 
chief reward, and physical pain as the chief 
punishment, it is by this fact seen to be a crude 
system. Nor does it elevate the standard in 
kind to extend this pleasure or pain to all 
eternity. We recognize in innumerable cases 
that mere pleasure and pain are no true tests 
of "good" or "welfare." The man would not 
exchange his human life with all its elements 



''Right" and'' OugW 223 

of pain for the swine's life with all its elements 
of pleasure. The higher standard is so wrought 
into our very instincts that we instantly recog- 
nize the completer life to be the higher or more 
desirable life, regardless of any question of 
pleasure or pain. Pleasure is no doubt a good, 
insomuch as it promotes a more abounding 
life ; and pain is no doubt a7i evil, insomuch 
as it represses or destroys life. But givejt the 
abounding life, and we feel that it would be a 
higher choice to take pain with the great life 
than to take pleasure with the little life. Our 
sympathy and admiration go out to the suffer- 
ing Prometheus rather than to the voluptuous 
Jove. We could rather worship — yea_, envy — 
the eternal martyr than the eternal swine. 

And now, finally, it will be asked, If the test 
of the good, of the true welfare, is its satisfac- 
tion of the desire for abounding life, how can 
we be sure that this is the " highest " satisfac- 
tion, that this is the " highest " desire ? In 
other words, what is the test of our test? 

We are well aware that here we reach a 
chasm which very many persons will be unpre- 
pared to cross with us. We shall cross safely, 
but the bridge is not such as tempts the unac- 
customed eye. 

For our answer can only be, There is no test 
except the existence of the desire itself. We 



224 Psychology and Ethics 

find by actual observation that in fact this is 
the paramount desire of man. To satisfy it 
seems to him the highest satisfaction, and there- 
fore it seems to him the highest desire. " But 
can he not in some way k7iow whether it is 
the highest.?" We answer, There is no other 
meaning to this word " highest," itself, under 
complete analysis, than "what \s found to he — 
in fact — paramount in human estimation." 

" But," it will be objected, " the soul finds in 
itself many desires. At one time one is strong- 
est, at other times another. How determine 
which of these is the paramount desire ? " We 
answer. We can only count that highest which is 
the most permanent and the paramount desire 
of the sanest and completest men. This desire 
w^e take as the test, not on the ground that it 
pleases us to take it ; not because we are de- 
void of the craving for some more certain 
sanction ; not from any consideration of its 
convenience in instruction, or in supporting 
this or that institution or creed ; but we take it 
because the honest truth appears to be that we 
have that, and we have no other. We may 
invent or imagine as many as we please, but, 
like it or not, conceive it to be safe or not, this 
— the mind's sane estimate of what is most 
desirable — is the only one that does actually 
in fact exist for us. 



''Right'' and ''Ought'' 225 

Many persons take such a view of the uni- 
verse as allows them to believe that they can 
contrive some safer way for men than the open 
sight of the actual truth. Even for themselves, 
some feel that it is more desirable to retain 
agreeable illusions than to allow them to be 
torn away. These persons will prefer to say 
concerning the test of right and duty, Such and 
such standards have been handed down from 
the past, and it is easiest for me and safest for 
the world to believe that the past had some 
superior wisdom in setting up these standards. 
"God's will," for example, is offered as the 
true test. But how do we know what is God's 
will ? He has revealed it, it will be said, in 
the Bible. But why should we believe this is a 
revelation from God, seeing that it was written 
by men, and appears to be so similar to what 
men have all along been accustomed to write 
elsewhere ? Because these particular men claim 
to have heard God say these things. But why 
believe such a strange claim when we should 
not think of believing it if any of our neighbors 
made it ? Because, it will be said, it was made 
a long time ago, and has been for a long time 
believed. But are there not many beliefs of 
great antiquity which have turned out to be 
erroneous ? 

At some such point the mind of the person 



226 Psychology and Ethics 

who insists on the existence of some supernat- 
urally revealed and infallible test for morals 
is apt to turn to this other support for his con- 
fidence in the Bible as a basis : its own inter- 
nal evidence of a divine character. "These 
commands," he says, " are evidently divine, 
because they are right ; because they are the 
highest and best in the world." But by what 
test right and highest and best ? It is the 
" vicious circle " again. 

There is no possible answer, try as we may 
to avoid it, but the answer we have already 
given : the test which the mind finds itself in 
fact applying is the only test. That to man is 
"best" which he most desires. That desire is 
the best which is his paramount and most per- 
manent desire. And that desire is, if we con- 
sult mankind in general, if we consult our own 
consciousness, or all history and all literature, 
the desire for a " good " or " welfare " consist- 
ing of the greatest possible total of conscious 
life. 

This desire for abounding life conceals itself 
under many more visible desires. It lies, how- 
ever, hidden under our craving for society, 
which stimulates and calls out increased activ- 
ity of all our powers ; under our craving for 
solitude, when now too much society serves 
only to repress and confine the greater activity 



''Right" and ''Ought'' 227 

of our own mind and spirit ; under our enjoy- 
ment of music, which fulfills not only the possi- 
ble capacity of the mere sense of hearing, but 
awakens a world of inner life, in memories and 
dreams ; under our pleasure in all art and lit- 
erature, which at once give wings and a wider 
horizon to the mind ; under our passion for 
broader truth, which (linking many facts in 
one) gives the intellect a clearer and more in- 
clusive grasp — a completer life of knowing ; 
under, at last, as we have seen, our aspiration 
for the highest " good " of all, which is but 
another name for the completest satisfaction, 
for all, of this highest desire. 

If any one says, "This is not the highest 
good thing, or summtim bomim,'^ he is merely 
saying (if we push the statement to the furthest 
analysis), " This is not what / find most desir- 
able — that is to say, what / most desire." It 
becomes, then, merely a question as to whose 
desire is to be the final arbiter; and we find 
none better than the desire of those who are 
the sanest and completest men — and in them, 
the permanent judgment, not any momentary 
whim. 

It would not be true to say, as might be said 
by some one who looked no deeper than the 
surface of the matter, that this leaves every 
man a law unto himself; or that it leaves 



228 Psychology and Ethics 

every man to do what seems good in his own 
eyes. On the contrary, it sends a man for his 
true law to the dictates of universal reason, 
against his personal passion, to what seems 
good, in the eyes of all sane and sober judg- 
ments, against the troubled vision of his mo- 
mentary desire. 

This is, as we have said, no new test ; it is 
that to which all moral precepts and principles 
have in reality been subjected from the begin- 
ning. Whatever sacred books, whatever divine 
revelations, whatever commandments written 
upon tables of brass or stone, have been 
adopted, have been adopted after being sub- 
jected to this test. The Ten Commandments, 
the Golden Rule, find and always have found 
in this their real sanction. And if to-morrow 
a code of moral rules were suddenly seen writ- 
ten in golden letters across the sky at noon- 
day, so that it should be said everywhere, " It 
cannot have come by any human means; it 
must be a revelation of the Deity," what would 
be the necessary action of our minds upon it ? 
We should necessarily do just what we have 
always done with Vedas, Korans, and Bibles. 
We should bring it to the test of the judg- 
ment of the human reason. We should ask, 
first of all, " Are these precepts right ? " If 
the reason declared them wrong, we should re- 



" Right " and " Ought " 229 

ject them, no matter what appeared to be their 
origin. If the stone tables had commanded, 
"Thou Shalt steal," and "Thou shalt kill," 
the human reason would have declared them 
wrong, and rejected them. If the Golden Rule 
were, " Hate thy neighbor, and do him evil," 
there would have been the same verdict and 
result. And by what test ? By this same old 
test, which, be we satisfied with it or not, is all 
we have : the test of cojisequences, as affecting 
human welfare, as promoting or frustrating 
what seems most desirable to men ; that is to 
say, the satisfaction of the highest human de- 
sire, the desire for true and full existence. 

"Thou shalt not kill," is not, then, right be- 
cause it is in the Bible. It is in the Bible 
because, by the test of human judgment, it is 
right. Or rather, that book in which it is found 
is held to be " The Bible," because these pre- 
cepts found there are by the human reason 
judged to be right. "Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself " is not a divine command 
because Jesus uttered it, but Jesus is ac- 
counted divine because he uttered such com- 
mands. If one dislikes to accept this state- 
ment, let him test its validity by asking himself, 
as before. If Jesus had uttered precisely con- 
trary commands to these, what character should 
we attribute to him ? To die for others is not 



230 Psychology and Ethics 

a divine act because Jesus did so, but that he 
did so is his highest claim to men's acceptance 
as a divine being. And by what test ? Always 
by this same test, — there is no other possible, 
— that these noble precepts and actions are 
recognized as being such as universally pro- 
mote welfare. And what welfare ? That which 
men universally seek as the most desirable, — 
abounding life. Not animal pleasure, for when- 
ever it clashes with this we decide against it ; 
not merely our own pleasure, even of the intel- 
lect and spirit, for whenever these clash with 
its attainment by others, we decide against it ; 
not merely happiness, even of the purest kind, 
and even for others, unless, indeed, we Hft the 
word " happiness " above any ordinary use of 
it, and make it stand for this highest welfare 
itself ; for in case of the alternative we esteem 
it better to be unhappy with abounding life 
than to be happy at any lower stage of being. 

But in reality no such alternative as this last 
is possible, except as an imaginary hypothesis, 
for it is the very characteristic of happiness of 
every desirable sort that it promotes life ; and 
of pain, that it represses and tends to destroy 
life. Happiness is therefore a thing worthy 
of pursuit, as a means. Even pleasure is a 
good thing, still as a means. Nor can it ever 
be a bad or wrong thing unless it contravene 



''Right'' and'' OugW 23 1 

the law of right ; unless, that is to say, it tends 
to oppose the highest welfare of self or others. 

The more one contemplates the human story 
in the past, or the human life as it goes on 
about us in the present, the more one realizes 
the truth of this generalization, that the desire 
for abounding life is the paramount desire of 
man. There is hardly an activity but goes 
back to this for its mainspring, hardly a de- 
sire but rests upon this deeper desire. All his- 
tory is the record of man's efforts to attain 
personal liberty ; and this liberty — for which 
so many battles have been fought, and dynas- 
ties overturned, and blood spilled — is only 
the riddance from whatever hampered large 
action and large living. It was the longing 
for " more life and fuller," not for self only 
but for all, that made the heroes and martyrs 
of the long struggle for free government. It 
was so of the struggle for religious liberty, so 
for liberty of thought. Freedom to do and be^ 
to the utmost limits of each individual's possi- 
bility, was the prize they sought. 

The history of the efforts of women toward 
emancipation from personal and social tyranny 
illustrates the working of this same funda- 
mental desire. It has not been so much any 
increase of pleasure they have sought, or for a 
position where they could be more happy, in 



232 Psychology and Ethics 

any mere sense of being contented, but the 
liberty to live larger lives, to be more, to have 
in themselves an increased total of the com- 
mon human existence. 

The history of all art is but another such 
illustration. Form after form of art has been 
developed under the pressure of this same de- 
sire to live in large worlds, to give the whole 
soul its fullest activity of life — if not through 
the actual surroundings, with their narrowing 
and deadening influences, then through the 
nerves of the receptive imagination, that can 
vibrate to the touch of the creative imagina- 
tion of the artist, and dream the gardens of 
paradise in a desert, or heaven in hell. Music, 
architecture, sculpture, painting, all have their 
hold on men through the fact that in the first 
place these sounds and forms and colors give 
the mere sense its fullest possible activity (as 
the chord depends for its delightfulness on its 
giving the ear a larger total of effect than is 
possible in the single tone, or the discord ; and 
as the line of beauty, the double waving curve, 
does the same for the eye) ; and in the second 
place, the fact that through the effect of these 
arts on the imagination, the feelings, the rea- 
son, they waken to stir — for the moment at 
least — the whole man, that was half dormant 
before, into full and abounding life. 



" Right " and " Ought " 233 

So, finally, the history of literature illustrates 
once more the working of this same paramount 
desire. The drama has moved and delighted 
men because it brought into their conscious 
existence a wealth of other scenes and more 
varied activity. It enabled them, for the one 
brief hour, to live through the emotions and ac- 
tions of many souls — to compress into a few 
rich moments the whole destinies of men or 
empires, made their own through the tumult of 
the inner life. Fiction, from its first crude be- 
ginnings in some Hebrew or Arabic tale to the 
novel of Scott or George Eliot, has been but 
the outcome of this same irrepressible craving 
to enlarge the bounds of our own narrow exist- 
ence through the inner experience of the for- 
tunes, the joys, the woes, of an imaginary world. 
Poetry, with its " eternal passion, eternal pain," 
has both been the expression of this hunger for 
a fuller life in the poet, and has fed the sacred 
fire of this aspiration in the world. 

And of the relative value of all art, as of 
all literature, this furnishes the only true and 
rational test ; what has it added to the inner 
life } That symphony, that painting, that poem 
is greatest which more than any other has had 
for its effect in the world " that we might have 
life " — the inner life, and through that the 
outer also — " and that we might have it more 
abundantly." 



234 Psychology and Ethics 

And so at last, to return to our starting- 
point, in morals also : that impulse, that choice, 
that action is the most " right," is the highest 
*' duty," which most tends to satisfy this para- 
mount human desire and aspiration, for that 
fuller and more abounding life which is not 
only the goal of all unconscious progress, work- 
ing in the dark of natural forces, but of all 
conscious wishes and purposes, working in the 
light of the human reason and will. 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INTERRUP- 
TIONS 

There is a certain small and yet in the long 
run important hindrance that I often encoun- 
ter in the act of writing, for which I should 
very much like to find the exact psychological 
explanation. It is very possibly a common 
experience with all toilers in pen and ink. 
When I am deeply absorbed in a piece of 
work, and my whole mind is fixed on a train 
of thought which I am trying to follow out and 
express in precise language, a sudden interrup- 
tion (as by my wife's asking me a question) 
causes a peculiar and specific mental wrench 
or jar that is more than an annoyance, and 
amounts to a positive pain. What is it that 
happens in the brain as the physical concomi- 
tant or cause of this ? I observe that the shock 
varies in intensity with the completeness of the 
absorption or abstraction of the mind in its 
work. This is so much a matter of instinct 
that I find myself, during any perceived liabil- 
ity to such interruption, withholding my atten- 
tion from complete concentration on my writ- 



236 Psychology and Ethics 

ing, in order to lessen the force of the painful 
blow that I feel may come at any moment. 
(This secondary effort, by the way, or voluntary 
restraining of the mind from its desired track, 
always seems to produce in me, no matter how 
much I may resist it, a kind of irritation or sub- 
irritation of temper, after a little, which soon 
destroys the possibility of any satisfactory pro- 
duction.) Is the physical explanation of this 
interruption-shock, perhaps, that the sudden 
back-flow of the nerve currents, inundating 
tracts in the brain left empty by the concentra- 
tion of the whole mind on its task, gives a kind 
of stab or jerk to the nervous centres ? And 
does the effort to withhold a part of the atten- 
tion, while consciously subject to interruption, 
correspond, physically, to a forcible keeping of 
all the channels partially filled against a too 
sudden wave, or jet, of energy ? 

The condition of things in the mind at such 
a time always seems to me (to suggest it by the 
merest inadequate hint of metaphor) as if the 
effort to hold and carry on a train of thought 
were a muscular struggle, while grasping tightly 
a number of separate lengths of bamboo rod to 
keep them close together, end to end, and in a 
perfectly straight line, as the necessary condi- 
tion of having a new length continually sprout 
out from the growing extremity. Now if, at 



The Psychology of Interruptions 237 

the moment when every nerve is strained to 
hold these pieces in position, some one were to 
give us a sudden shove in the back, — such 
seems the kind of interruption I speak of. 

Whatever be the correct explanation of the 
phenomenon, the suffering and hindrance from 
it are considerable in the course of a lifetime ; 
and we hereby bring it to the attention of the 
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Wri — 
But, come to think, there is no such benevo- 
lent organization as yet in existence. 



THE BREAD-AND-BUTTER MOMENTS 
OF THE MIND 

It is astonishing how insensible we some- 
times are to the most beautiful or sublime spec- 
tacles. Noble scenes, which at another time 
would inspire the imagination and thrill the 
heart with a tumult of emotions, now unfold 
their glory before our unmoved eyes, and the 
humdrum thoughts plod along their accus- 
tomed way. Travelers know this phenomenon 
very well. Ely Cathedral lives in my memory 
as a delicious vision of solemn loveliness ; but 
when my friends praise York Minster, I hardly 
recall that I was ever there. This indifference 
is to be ascribed to the fact that in York my 
brain happened to be dough or putty for the 
time being, and in no respect on the architec- 
ture of the minster. I remember that George 
Sand had this experience in her voyage to 
Italy. In the " Histoire de ma Vie " she says : 

" Je poursuivis mon voyage quand meme, ne 
souffrant pas, mais peu a peu si abrtitie par les 
frissons, les defaillances et la somnolence, que 
je vis Pise et le Campo Santo avec une grande 



The Bread-and-Butter Moments 239 

apathie. II me devint meme indifferent de 
suivre une direction ou une autre ; Rome et 
Venise furent jouees a pile ou face. Vetiise 
face retomba dix fois sur le plancher. J'y 
voulus voir une destinee, et je partis pour 
Venise par Florence. . . . Je vis toutes les 
belles choses qu'il fallait voir, . . . maisj'etais 
glacee, et, en regardant le Persee de Cellini et 
la Chapelle carree de Michel Ange, il me 
semblait, par moments, que j'etais statue moi- 
meme. La nuit, je revais que je devenais mo- 
saique et je comptais attentivement mes petits 
Carres de lapis et de jaspe." 

But the same phlegmatic seizure often occurs 
to us at home and in familiar surroundings. 
Three nights ago, standing at my window, I 
saw the full moon rise superbly through a low 
horizon drapery of shadowed cloud-folds ; and 
I said to myself, Let us go walk in the garden, 
and drink in the splendor of this celestial spec- 
tacle. So I sought my favorite pacing-ground, 
a wide path from the round rose-bed to the 
elm -tree, running between lines of stately 
cannas. There had been purifying rain, and 
the sky was deepened to its most lustrous 
dark ; the soft billow-edges of the few fleeces, 
swimming over across the big moon, caught, 
turn by turn, a faint tinge of halo colors. The 
moon was dazzling. Who can believe that 



240 Psychology and Ethics 

mere sunshine, falling on mere rock and sand, 
will reflect such a white-cold intensity of light ? 
I gazed intently on the blinding shield, as if to 
compel it to seem to me what it really is, — 
the big globe, rolling there, dizzily unsupported, 
in empty space. I said, " That distance across 
the bulging disk is about that which the Pacific 
Railroad traverses across our continent. Let 
me try to imagine the little train, full of earth 
inhabitants, creeping in a curve around yonder 
point of shadow, and across the bridgeless 
nose of the man in the moon." For an in- 
stant the conception of the globular form and 
the enormous bulk, swinging on its rounds, 
almost touched on the confines of my expectant 
imagination ; then fled away unseizable, and 
left but the silvery spot, stuck there inade- 
quately against the blue ceiling, so ridiculously 
near that even the lighter clouds pass behind, 
instead of before it, and a venturous balloon 
might be capable of bumping it at any rash 
discharge of ballast. 

Then I took up my pacing back and forth. 
The broad silvered leaves of the cannas seemed 
to float motionless in the great flood of light, 
and beneath each hung its motionless black 
shade. Every shadow of every delicate bough 
and twig of the beech and the elm was lace ; 
and bough and twig themselves, less distinct 



The Bread-and-Butter Moments 241 

and more ethereal than their shadows, were 
only the mentally conceived patterns, or Pla- 
tonic Ideas, of the lace, hovering above it in 
the air. What a mysterious and glorious night, 
and what subtlest and most celestial dreams 
should throng the brain at such an hour! 
Back and forth, to and fro, I paced ; and what, 
think you, were the sublime ideas I found in 
my brain, as I suddenly became aware of my- 
self, after some minutes of floating in that sea 
of twice - distilled and space - traversing radi- 
ance ? I was listening with lively displeasure 
to the squeaking of my own new shoes. I was 
thinking, " How can this intolerable thing be 
cured ? " I was picturing in my imagination 
the sedulous shoemaker, anxiously handling 
the superinteguments, and discussing with me 
the possible ways and means of silencing this 
music of abandoned soles. I remembered that 
some one had once recommended a hypoder- 
mic injection of pumice-stone. As I turned 
from the shadow back into the full flood of 
radiance, I found myself wondering whether 
the leathern layers would have to be unstitched, 
or whether anything could be done with a 
gimlet. 

I saw that the whole magnificent spectacle 
of the night was being wasted on such an insect 
as I, and that the most suitable scheme was to 
go ingloriously to bed. 



THE SLIPPERINESS OF CERTAIN 
WORDS 

Next to the pleasure of finding ourselves 
different from people in general with regard 
to great matters is the pleasure of discovering 
our identity vs^ith them in small matters. For 
my own part, at least, I like to know that I am 
not so eccentric as I may have feared in vari- 
ous little " tricks and manners " of my body or 
my mind. I am always pleased to meet people 
who wear their thumbs inside their shut hand ; 
and who have square-toed shoes ; and who like 
the smell of catnip and the taste of some cates 
when a little burnt ; and who reluct at shaking 
hands ; and who never sharpen the lead of a 
pencil ; and who say " good-morning " to the 
servants ; and who reject the use of a spoon, 
as being a thing to take powders in, or the 
milder nourishments of helpless infancy. 

So it would be a gratification to me to know 
that others are subject to a habit of the mind 
which has always clung to me, and which I 
suspect of being nearly universal. I mean the 
habit of forgetting certain words, which have 



The Slipperiness of Certain Words 243 

been reached for and have slipped away so 
many times that they have become perma- 
nently sHppery, at least about the handle. 
There are words which are such old offenders 
in this way that I feel their vicinity before I 
get to them, in speaking or writing, and I say 
to myself, There ! I shall have a time, now, to 
get hold of that word ! — and so I always do. 
Peremptory is one of these slippery words, with 
me. Complacent is another. Sententious is a 
third. And there is still another, which even 
now, as I sought it for an example, escaped 
my grasp, " as slipper as an eeles sliding : " it 
is the word deprecatory. The way I took to 
find it and seize upon it, just at this moment, 
was by keeping before my mind's eye the 
image of a humble small dog standing before 
a haughty big one, in momentary doubt as to 
whether the tail will wag or the jaws will de- 
vour. By keeping this picture vividly present 
to one lobe of the brain, while the other lobe 
strained every nerve to seize the initial syllable, 
vaguely felt (that most mysterious state of the 
mind) to be just hovering on the very edge of 
the memory, " on the tip of my tongue," as we 
say, — thus at last I clutched it and drew it in. 
There are certain proper names that have 
become thus polished on the handle ; that is to 
say, on the initial syllable. Sometimes I sue- 



244 Psychology and Ethics 

ceed in getting them by working at the other 
end, and the final syllable drags in the unwill- 
ing first. My best reliance, however, is in the 
alphabet. By beginning at a, b, <r, and going 
slowly down the letters, watching closely for 
the least sign of recognition, the smallest indi- 
cation of that chemical affinity or magnetic at- 
traction which the mental image of the person 
shows for its proper title when you come to its 
initial letter, I can commonly find the required 
proper name. Sometimes it happens that I 
have to give it up, for the moment, and by 
and by, when engaged about something else, it 
** comes to me," as the result of unconscious 
cerebration. I have an acquaintance named 
Bonstead, a most excellent dealer in some of 
the necessaries of life. If he had any idea, 
how I have struggled with his name, I believe 
he would hardly consider it friendly conduct 
on his part not to go and have it changed. 
Now there is no assignable reason why this 
name should slip my memory more than others. 
It is, on the face of it, a name of good augury, 
and has been borne by admirable people. To 
another mind my own name, or that of the 
reader, would as likely be the erring one. And 
so of the few exceptional words cited above. 
Another memory will doubtless have entirely 
different examples. My explanation is that 



The Slipperiness of Certain IVords 245 

these happen to be words of which, for some 
purely accidental reason, I got but a feeble 
hold when first encountered; so that, having 
slipped once, and again, and still again, they 
acquired the habit of slipping, and became per- 
manently slippery. 



THE ETHICS OF THE PLANK AT SEA 

Contrary to my custom, I showed some 
verses — before the ink and my affection for 
them had taken the time to dry — to a critical 
friend. Now this lady's mind is so constructed 
that when you attack it with ever so casual a 
remark or question you never know what may 
happen. On this occasion what happened was 
a discussion in ethics. But I had better give 
the lines first of all : — 

HIS NEIGHBOR AS HIMSELF. 

Black the storming ocean, crests that leap and whelm ; 
Ship a tumbling ruin, stripped of spar and helm. 
Now she shudders upward, strangled with a sea ; 
Then she hangs a moment, and the moon breaks free 
On her huddled creatures, waiting but to drown, 
As she reels and staggers, ready to go down. 

Crash ! the glassy mountain whirls her to her grave. 
In the foam three struggle ; one his love will save. 
There 's a plank for two, but, as he lifts her there, 
Lo ! his rival sinking ; eyes that clutch despair. 
Only a swift instant left him to decide, — 
Shall he drown, and yield the other life and bride ? 



The Ethics of the Plank at Sea 247 

In the peaceful morning stays a snowy sail. 
Two afloat, — one missing. Which one ? Did he fail, — 
Coward, merely man ? Or did the great sea darken eyes 
All divinely shining with self-sacrifice ? 

I waited while she read them. Then I waited 
while she read them again. Then there was a 
pause, and I said, " Well ? " Then there was 
more pause, during which the mercury of my 
estimate of the verses slowly sank. Then I 
said, humbly, " I did think of sending them to 
The Magazine." 

" Yes," said she slowly. (The mercury con- 
tinued to go down.) " But I don't believe in 
the ethics of it." 

" Is f/iat all ? " said I brightly. 

" Is that a//?" said she darkly. 

"Well, then," said I, humbled again, "what 
is wrong with the ethics ? Instance me, good 
shepherd." 

" In the first place," she was good enough 
to explain, " I don't like this handing a girl 
around as if she were a transferable piece of 
property. It is wrong, and what is worse, it 
is sentimental. Because, of course, the one 
whom, in a fair field, she loves is the one who 
has a right to her, and how can he give her up 
without sacrificing her, too ? " 

" But," said I, " the fact that she is his bride 
does not necessarily imply that she loves him 
best." . 



248 Psychology and Ethics 

" Does n't it ! " interjected she. 

" At least we may suppose that in the case 
given the woman's affection or fancy — for it 
may as yet be only that — is evenly balanced 
between the two." 

" Then," said she, " let his own love for her 
decide him. That he knows. He cannot know 
that the other loves her so well." 

" But," still objected I, " suppose he is a 
very common-sense, hard-headed person, and 
his view of love is that, as a mere sentiment, it 
amounts to nothing ; that the important ques- 
tion is, Whose love is likely to surround her 
with the most comfortable existence, the best 
opportunities, — in short, the greatest happi- 
ness ? And suppose he is perfectly aware that 
he himself is the old, sad, and every way unde- 
sirable Doe, while the rival is the young, chip- 
per, and every way desirable Roe." 

"You talk," said she, "as if the man himself 
had no rights, no claims to happiness on his 
own account." 

" Oh, but," said I, " must he not recognize 
as well the other's rights and claims, and ' love 
his neighbor as himself ' ? " 

" But," she insisted, " not better than him- 
self." 

" Would you have him, then, make a cool 
calculation — on a plank at sea ! — of the ex- 



The Ethics of the Plank at Sea 249 

act relative values of himself and the other 
man, and adjudge the bride and the life to the 
most worthy ? " 

"I know," she replied, "that in all the small 
matters of daily intercourse it is the sweeter 
and more dignified course to give up, regard- 
less of all question of who has the right, or 
which is the more worthy. But when it comes 
to the uttermost, when one's hold on life or on 
the thing that alone could make life valuable is 
at stake, why should not a rational mind look 
down upon the whole matter as might an un- 
biased inhabitant of Mars, and give the prize 
to him who has the most desert ? " 

" But," said I, " could even the most rational 
mind ever hope to be an unbiased judge of the 
relative claims of another and himself ? And 
besides, supposing the two men are justly esti- 
mated as precisely equal in value, the world 
would still be the gainer for the first posses- 
sor's giving up the plank. In either case, it 
would have had a living man ; but now it has 
the man plus the act of self-sacrifice. To save 
the other man instead of himself is not merely 
substituting x for x ; it substitutes x + y. For 
my part, I must still hold to the ethics of 
x+ yr 

She let me have the last word, and there we 
left it. 



THE MIND AS A BAD PORTRAIT 
PAINTER 

Most people seem to experience an odd 
difficulty in realizing that the very greatest per- 
sonages of the past ever were young. Yet this 
conception is necessary, if we wish to see them 
as they really were, and not according to the 
text-books and other sources of illusory tradi- 
tion. Milton, for insta*nce : who does not think 
of him habitually as the " blind old bard " ? 
To test this, let any one arrange to have the 
name brought suddenly before the attention at 
an odd moment, and see what kind of image 
presents itself to the imagination in response 
to the word. Ten to one it will prove to be a 
venerable but sightless and piteous figure ; a 
confused mixture of several superimposed 
images, of which the most prominent may be 
some dolorous frontispiece engraving of a 
stoop-shouldered bust, or the blind, pathetic 
form in Munkacsy's vivid group. It needs 
but an instant's reflection to see that this is a 
very inadequate and unfortunate conception of 
the actual Milton in his best days. True, he 



I 



The Mind as a Bad Portrait Painter 251 

was both old and blind when the two Paradises 
were committed to paper, but not when they 
were first conceived in his creative brain. And 
what of that long period of his middle man- 
hood, when he was not only poet, but states- 
man and diplomate and terrible fighter for free 
thought and free government, — an erect, ac- 
tive figure, as full of force and fire as any 
trooper of them all ? What of the still earlier 
days, when the beautiful young fellow charmed 
the hearts of man and maid, "cunning at 
fence," of the literal sort, as well as in all the 
elegant intricacies of Italian sonneteering and 
polished statecraft ? For my part, I like best 
to remember the outward aspect of Milton as 
he appears in Vertue's engraving from the 
Onslow portrait at the age of twenty-one, — a 
jocund youngster, with laughing dark gray eyes 
and fresh, manly face ; full of the sap so soon 
to mature into the tough oak that helped — he 
more than almost any man, if we consider his 
having been both brain and pen to Cromwell, 
besides his own incessant prose polemics on 
the, side of freedom — to wrestle out our mod- 
ern liberties in that fierce tug of the Great 
Revolution. It was at just the time of this 
lovely boy portrait that he was writing to his 
college mate : — 

" Festivity and poetry are not incompatible. 



252 Psychology and Ethics 

Why should it be different with you? But, 
indeed, one sees the triple influence of Bac- 
chus, Apollo, and Ceres in the verses you have 
sent me. And then, have you not music, — 
the harp lightly touched by nimble hands, and 
the lute giving time to the fair ones as they 
dance in the old tapestried room ? Believe me, 
where the ivory keys leap and the accompany- 
ing dance goes round the perfumed hall, there 
will the song-god be." 

The teachers of literature might well make 
some effort to rehabilitate these misimagined 
worthies of the past, to remove from them the 
disguises of age and senility that a too rever- 
ent tradition has thrown about them, and to 
present them in that bloom of manhood be- 
longing to the period of their greatest activity. 
If I were a Professor of Literature, I should 
desire to hang my lecture-room with pictures, 
— not of the old traditional and forbidding 
decrepitudes, but of Milton, for example, as 
the charming young swordsman, with velvet 
cloak tossed on the ground and rapier in hand ; 
of Homer, no longer blind and prematurely 
agonized, as it were, with our modern perplex- 
ities in finding him a birthplace, but as the 
splendid young Greek athlete, limbed and 
weaponed like his own youthful vision of 
Apollo, as 



The Mind as a Bad Portrait Painter 253 

" Down he came, 
Down from the summit of the Olympian mount, 
Wrathful in heart ; his shoulders bore the bow 
And hollow quiver ; there the arrows rang 
Upon the shoulders of the angry god, 
As on he moved. He came as comes the night, 
And, seated from the ships aloof, sent forth 
An arrow ; terrible was heard the clang 
Of that resplendent bow." 

I would tamper with even such venerated tra- 
ditional dignities as Mrs. Barbauld, for the sake 
of their own rehabilitation in the eyes of mis- 
guided youth. She should no longer frown 
formidable behind the stately prsenomen of 
" Letitia ; " she should be given back her true 
girl-name of " Nancy," and be represented, after 
her own account, as lithely and blithely climb- 
ing an apple-tree. Pythagoras should be a 
gracious stripling, crowned with ivy buds and 
stretched at a pretty goat-girl's feet, touching 
delicately the seven-stringed lyre. Even Moses 
might be shown as a buxom and frolicsome 
boy, shying stones at the crocodiles. Only 
Shakespeare, of all the pantheon, would need 
no change. His eternal youthfulness has been 
too much for the text-books and the monument- 
makers, and we always seem to conceive him 
as the fresh-hearted and full-forced man he 
really was. 



THE FELT LOCATION OF THE "I" 

I SUPPOSE everybody has tried, first or last, 
to make out just where he feels himself to be 
situated in himself. When the finger is pinched, 
it is plainly enough not /that am pinched, but 
my finger ; and the same is true of a hurt in 
any part of the body. Notwithstanding the 
fact that the great controlling nerve-centres 
are in the brain, I have never been able to dis- 
cover that a headache felt any nearer me than 
a finger-ache. Perhaps the nearest approach 
I have known to a sense of closeness, or to a 
veritable me-3.che, has been a sharp pain in the 
stomach, especially when, on one occasion, I 
was struck in that region by a baseball bat, 
which slipped from the hand of the striker. 

But there is one point concerning our felt 
location which I think we all are sure of. It 
is the one brought out so deliciously by the 
dear little girl in " Punch." " You ought to 
tie your own apron-strings, Mabel ! " says one 
of those irresistible young women of Du Mau- 
rier's. " How can I, aunty ? " is the reply. 
" I 'm in front, you know ! " 



ne Felt Location of the *'/" 255 

This is a shrewd observation in minute psy- 
chology. The spinal chord runs along the 
back, with all its ganglia; the weight of the 
brain is well behind ; yet we are not there. In 
other words, the curious thing is that we feel 
ourselves to be, not in the region where im- 
pressions are received and answered in the 
brain and spinal cord, but where they first meet 
the nerve-extremities. We seem to inhabit not 
the citadel, but the outer walls. At the point 
of peripheral expansion of the nerves of sense, 
where the outer forces begin to be apprehended 
by us as inner, — " in front," where the fingers 
feel, and the nose smells, and the eyes see, — 
there, if anywhere, we find ourselves to be. 

I have often been interested to notice where- 
abouts on our bodily surface another animal 
looks to find us. The man, or even the little 
child, looks at the face. Is it because the voice 
issues thence .'' Yet it is the eyes, rather than 
the mouth, that is watched. Is it because the 
expression, the signal station for the changing 
moods, is there more than elsewhere ? A dog, 
also, invariably looks up into the face. So does 
a bird, notwithstanding the fact that the food 
comes from the hand. Why does he not con- 
sider the " I," so far as his needs are con- 
cerned, to lie in the part that feeds him ? But 
no ; he cocks his head to one side, and directs 



256 Psychology and Ethics 

his lustrous little eye straight to our own, in 
order to establish what communion he can with 
the very him of his master and friend. 

It is hardly less pathetic than our own hu- 
man efforts to pierce, by the searching pene- 
tration of the eyes, to the real personality of 
each other. We never succeed. We utter our 
imperfect articulate sounds to each other's 
ears, but we do not look thither. It is still at 
the appealing and dumbly yearning eyes that 
we gaze, and go away baffled and sorrowful at 
last. 



WHAT IS THE OLDEST THING IN 
THE WORLD? 

The human mind is pretty hard to suit. It 
gets tired of old things, but when everything 
in the environment seems brand-new it expe- 
riences a still more profound dissatisfaction. 
Then an inveterate craving for something an- 
cient asserts itself. Thus we are as " difficult " 
as the boarding-house boy of whom my bach- 
elor friend tells me : when they help him to 
syrup on his buckwheat cake, and ask with 
fond solicitude, " Do you want it drizzle-drozzle 
or crinkle-crankle ? " he responds only with a 
vague scowl ; and when the honeyed stream 
descends in the latter form he whines, "You 
hieiu I wanted it drizzle-drozzle ! " 

When the hunger for something good and 
old is strong upon us, we Americans are driven 
to cross the ocean in search of it. But even 
in the old countries it is not everything that 
can satisfy us. A comrade of mine, who has 
been roaming up and down Europe, writes me 
that " Niirnberg is the only city that really 
keeps its promise of seeming old." When we 



258 Psychology and Ethics 

cannot conveniently travel for it, this periodi- 
cal want of the flavor of antiquity sends us 
to the Old Curiosity Shops. We accumulate 
old truck of various sorts. Worm-eaten furni- 
ture may for the moment soothe our madness. 
Moss-grown and tumble-down houses become 
captivating to our fancy. We are even patient 
of old jokes. We seek the society of the elders, 
and hear with constantly renewed pleasure their 
castanean anecdotes. We refuse to read any 
book that has a clean new cover. The gleam 
of fresh paint vexes our eyes, as we walk along 
the rows of spick-span houses. Even our let- 
ter-paper must have torn and ragged edges, as 
if we had found it in our great-grandmother's 
portfolio, in a chest in the garret. 

This hankering is itself an old trait. Infal- 
lible Bartlett, in that volume of inexhaustible 
interest to those who like to turn over the quin- 
tessential distillations of the wit and wisdom 
of all times, — the " Familiar Quotations," — 
gives quaint illustrations of it under the head 
of *' Old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old 
friends to trust ! " It was this same mood that 
made Dan Chaucer assert (as everybody re- 
members, but as nobody resents hearing over 
again, — it is, would say our friend the Judge, 
" so deliciously wrong "), — 



The Oldest Thing in the World 259 

" For out of the old fieldes, as men saithe, 
Cometh al this new corne fro yere to yere, 
And out of olde bookes, in good faithe, 
Cometh al this new science that men lere." 

Yet, in the form in which we feel it in this 
country, this hunger for the old is one of the 
six or seven thousand traits which our British 
cousins find it difficult to comprehend. We 
cross the sea to find a cathedral that is truly 
ancient, and they point us with pride to this 
summer's restorations ; but while the group^ 
stands admiring them, the American slides 
away quietly, and " slips behind a tomb," or is 
found rapt on some dear unrestored nook of 
the ivied cloister. Just so it is on the Conti- 
nent : Paris is always too wonderfully new and 
shining, as if Orpheus had strummed it up only 
this very morning from entirely new materials. 
My favorite spot is in the Louvre, between the 
five-footed bull of Assyria and the rose-colored 
granite sarcophagus of Rameses III. The 
Hague is delightfully swept-up and washed- 
down and immaculately fresh and resplendent ; 
but my best moment there was when, in the 
museum, I took in my hand a gold coin of 
Alexander, and as it lay cool and smooth in 
my palm I thought it was probably one that 
the conqueror himself flung ringing against the 



260 Psychology and Ethics 

tub-staves of Diogenes, the day that worthy 
growled at him to *' get out of his sunshine." 

Sometimes the question has presented itself, 
What is the very oldest thing in the world that 
was seen by the men of yore and is still visible 
to us ? What is the object, or line, or point, 
which we can now behold, that was gazed on 
by human eyes farthest back in antiquity ? It 
is certainly not to be looked for in this coun- 
try. We are ridiculously new. It was only the 
other day that Columbus discovered us, and it 
was but a little while previous that, as red In- 
dians, we had appeared on the scene ; not long 
enough, obviously, to have thinned out the deer 
and partridges. As mound-builders, we had 
only a short time before thrown up our queer 
constructions for the puzzling of the antiqua- 
ries. The very soil here under me, as I write, 
is painfully recent. It was but a few thousand 
years ago that some sportive glacier came ca- 
pering down from the Pole, and plastered it. 
in the shape of rock-meal, over our bare sand- 
stones. Over in the Sierra Nevadas, it is true, 
I lay one sunshiny afternoon along a gleaming 
slope of the primeval granite, and cooled my 
cheek against its ice-planed polish, and admit- 
ted that here at last was something pretty old. 
Yet " rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun " as 
was this gigantic adamantine couch, there was 



Tide Oldest Thing in the IVorld 261 

a still older thing playing at that very moment 
about us. It was the mountain wind. I could 
put out my hand to it, and reflect that it might 
have been this very identical breath of air that 
bubbled up through the sea when the towers of 
Atlantis went down ; or it may have flickered 
the flame on Abel's altar, "You need not," I 
might have said to it, " think to palm yourself 
off as a freakish young zephyr, just born of 
yonder snow-streak and the sun-warmed rock ; 
you have been roaming this planet ever since 
its birth. You have whirled in cyclones, and 
danced with the streamers of the aurora ; it 
was you that breathed Job's curses, and the 
love-vows of the first lover that was ever for- 
sworn." 

But there is still an older thing to link us 
with the earliest of our race : it is the nightly 
procession of the stars. How old are the 
names of these familiar constellations ? Ptol- 
emy gives a list of forty-eight of them ; and 
some were certainly known to Homer and to 
the eldest of the Hebrew writers. Is it an 
utterly wild speculation that they may be so 
ancient as to have once fairly represented the 
outlines of the bears and lions, archers and 
hunters, whose names they carry ? The stars, 
we know, are forever shifting their relative po- 
sitions, if only a few hair's-breadths every thou- 



262 Psychology and Ethics 

sand years. Now the Scorpion is still a fairly 
suggestive scorpion, and Draco a tolerable 
dragon, winding his scaly length about the Lit- 
tle Bear. May it not be that Ursa Major took 
his name so many aeons ago that he was then 
a veritable ursine figure, instead of the later 
Wain and the Great Dipper of our own day ? 
Let not the severe scientist frown at this fancy 
of a mere literary man. Let him keep his tem- 
per, remembering the dictum of that other and 
more solemn literary man who averred that 
only " the undevout astronomer gets mad," or 
words more or less to that effect. 

At least we may have the satisfaction of feel- 
ing, when we look up at the stars, that our eyes 
are fastened on the very oldest things we know 
of in the world. We can be sure that human 
eyes traced out, night after night, those very 
lines, — squares, triangles, rings, the arrow of 
the Archer, the wings of the Swan, the scales 
of the Balance, the " bands of Orion," — longer 
ago than in the case of any shapes and forms 
that our eyes can now behold ; unless it be the 
wrinkled visage of the Man in the Moon, or 
the fiery circle of the sun itself. 



THE FREE WILL OF THE BONFIRE 

As we pass away from the period of child- 
hood, most of its wonderful sights lose their 
fascination. To experienced and disillusioned 
middle age it almost seems that nothing is any- 
longer wonderful, except perhaps the fact that 
nothing is any longer wonderful. But for my 
own part, as I go on in life, I find that two or 
three of the child's great spectacles still keep 
for me their freshness. One of these is the 
elephant leading the circus procession through 
the village street. I never could see it enough, 
that huge, unearthly shape, moving solemnly 
along ; flapping its wings of ears not for com- 
mon and mundane fly-guards, but in some mys- 
terious gesture or ceremonial ; bending its 
architectural legs in the wrong place ; waving 
its trunk in incantation ; seeing none of the 
trivial street matters to right or left, but ab- 
sorbed in Oriental dreams. I used to think 
it strange that people who were rich enough 
should not have one always pacing about their 
own back yards. 

Another of these spectacles of childhood 



264 Psychology and Ethics 

that keeps its charm for me is the locomotive 
at full speed. Momentum is but a word in a 
book, except when I stand as near as I dare to 
the clattering rails, and take the fearful joy of 
seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, so to speak, 
with the trembling antennae of my mind, the 
thunderous rush of the iron mass as it reaches 
me, and is gone. A different and calmer plea- 
sure is to watch the train from a half mile's 
distance across the fields, — how slick is its 
slipping along, "without haste, without rest," 
as if independently of any propelling force ; for 
it is the train that appears to run the driving- 
wheels, not the driving-wheels the train. It is 
not momentum now, but the inertia of motion ; 
not a missile or projectile, hurled from behind 
or drawn from before, but a thing whose state 
of speed is as natural and immutable as to 
other things the state of rest. Only I never 
can make the forward motion of the engine 
itself appear steady and uniform. To my eye 
there is some optical illusion by which the 
rushing and whizzing creature seems inces- 
santly to hang for the smallest fraction of a 
second, then leap forward, then hang again ; 
and so, by alternate infinitesimal checks and 
boundings ahead, to fly on its swift way. 

But the sight in which I still take the most 
childlike delight is the spring bonfire. Just 



ne Free IVill of the Bonfire 265 

about the time that the cherry-trees are snow- 
ing out into full bloom; and the bluebirds, 
loveliest of feathered things, are talking about 
nesting-boxes in gentle, irresolute voices, soft 
as their breasts and their flight ; and the first 
round clouds are rolling across a deeper azure 
than has yet appeared ; and some merry maid, 
herself freshly blossomed out in a sprigged 
spring gown, comes in triumphant with the 
first arbutus, then the sound of the rake is 
heard in the land. The offending sticks and 
straws of last year's garden life are gathered 
together into dry and light-tossed piles. Now 
the eager child is permitted, if he is good, the 
untold felicity of setting off the bonfire. There 

is 

*' The quick, sharp scratch 
And blue spurt of a lighted match," 

the instant's breathless suspense while the first 
pungency of the vaporous odor steals out, the 
sere sticks keeping at least some fragrant mem- 
ory of the past summer within them, and giv- 
ing up this last ghost in reluctant and wavering 
smoke. It is fairly lighted, and now in a mo- 
ment blows in freshly the favoring gale that 
all flames and other aspiring spirits call to 
themselves out of whatever depth of stagnation 
around them, and " up leaps and out springs " 
the crimson, the orange, the scarlet, the vividly 



266 Psychology and Ethics 

flame-colored flame. Always out of soft sheaths 
of brown smoke the blades of fire dart upward, 
in curves, and bounding whirls and spirals, and 
sudden sidelong sword-thrusts. Would it not 
all seem the very quintessence of voluntary, 
self-impelled aspiration upward and away from 
earth? In sober scientific verity, however, 
what is at the bottom of all that swift and 
buoyant skyward impulse ? It is no life within ; 
it is all force from without. Atmospheric pres- 
sure is the plain prose of it. It is a pretty 
illusion, but there is really no heavenward 
striving in the flame. It leaps and bounds 
upward in beautiful freedom, but it is only — 
oh, the inexorable fact ! — that the weight of 
the heavier air around it squeezes the flame out 
of its way in helpless obedience to gravity. 
And so an uneasy question creeps into the 
mind, namely, this : If these leaping crests of 
the flame, these upflung wings, so eager and 
mad to rise that flame shreds away from flame 
in the upward rush, leaving detached waves of 
fire hanging free of the crimson column, and 
flickering an instant by themselves, — if this is 
all but the illusory aspect of inert matter under 
the pressure of outside circumstance, what may 
we think of our own semblance of free will and 
aspiration ? As we look from the flame to the 
man, must we say, " So he " ? Is each appar- 



The Free Will of the Bonfire 267 

ently spontaneous out-thrust of free impulse 
nothing but a blind result of the composition 
of forces surrounding us in the world ? 

If this would seem a dolorous doubt, it has, 
on second thought, another and more comfort- 
able side. If wills were perfectly free of out- 
side influence, what a jostle and shock of 
chaotic impulses ! It would be like a starry 
universe in which gravity had fallen asleep, all 
the planets gone mad and become comets, and 
every comet an egoistic and resistless force 
bent on universal destruction. It is curious to 
consider that, unless the human will were con- 
trolled by outside forces, — influenced, at least, 
and is not every influence to that extent a con- 
trol ? — it would be impossible to sway any 
friend for good, impossible to be swayed by any 
friend for good, since the influencing will is 
but an outside force to any other will. What 
would become of education, training, all loving 
ministrations of gentle control, if every child's 
own choice and every evil passion's propulsion 
were a supreme free force, a blind flame, leap- 
ing hither and thither at its own impulse? 
Free will ? — it seems our most priceless pos- 
session. Fate? — it seems our deadliest foe. 
But when we go to another human soul, with 
some confidence that we may win it to forego 
an evil opportunity, and to take the better and 



268 Psychology and Ethics 

wiser path, it is because we rely on being able 
to step, ourselves, into the chain of controlling 
forces surrounding that other will, and so to 
become its fate, or some small segment of its 
fate, as against its own free will. I feel that I 
am free, and I delight to feel it ; but I know that 
there is at this moment approaching me, un- 
seen, on the train, or across the ocean, or down 
the street, a friend whose will, an outside force 
to me, shall bend me this way or that by a 
word. And at this fact, too, how can I but 
rejoice ? — although I recognize plainly enough 
that the more I am loved by any spirit wiser 
and stronger than my own, the less I shall be 
free. That as yet unspoken word, I know, is 
but one among ten million converging forces, 
in the centre of which my will vibrates and 
quivers in delicate response to each electric 
thrill of influence. If it were not so, again, 
how could one take measures against the ques- 
tionable possibilities of his own future self ? If 
my will, at a given hour of next year or ten 
years hence, is to be a free and uncontrollable 
impulse, what use for me to legislate for it 
to-day ? 

And there is one other and final consolation 
in that bugbear of a thought that the leaping 
flame is but the slave of the crowding air : it is 
from the reflection that, whether it be safe or 



The Free Will of the Bonfire 269 

not for universal exoteric doctrine, " the evil 
that we do " not only " lives after us ; " it lived 
before us. The seeds of it were sown within 
us from without, like the meteoric dust that 
may have brought the germs of foul weeds 
upon a virgin planet. Evil deeds, evil thoughts, 
they are all of the nature of an influenza, — an 
influence^ or a convergence of a multitude of 
such. For the moment, if only for the mo- 
ment, we break away from the sane sense of 
personal responsibility, and, turning on the 
ghost of our bad deed, we cry, "Thou canst 
not say / did it ! " And yet — 



THE INVISIBLE PART OF THIS WORLD 
WE LIVE IN : A TALK TO SCHOOL- 
CHILDREN 

I WANT to talk to you a few minutes this 
afternoon about the invisible part of this world 
we are living in. I did not say that I meant 
to talk about the invisible world, for by that 
you would have thought I was going to speak 
of some far-off, unintelligible matters, wholly 
distinct from the world around us with which 
we are familiar. But what I want to remind 
you of is this : that there is a great portion of 
this wonderful world of ours which we scarcely 
ever think about, because it is invisible, and 
yet which is just as real and just as near to all 
of us as these desks and books and clothes. 
There are forces and motions here which would 
be astounding and frightful, if we could fairly 
realize them, without at the same time appre- 
ciating the supreme order by which they are all 
controlled. 

To begin with, here are a great many cubic 
feet of oxygen and nitrogen, mixed together 
into a transparent fluid which we call air, across 



The Invisible Part of this World 271 

whose invisible waves the sounds you are lis- 
tening to are being carried to your ears like 
ripples ; a fluid so delicate and fine that it is 
penetrating our lungs, each breath passing over 
to the blood its little burden of life-giving oxy- 
gen, yet so vast in extent, reaching up as it 
does above the clouds, that its weight in this 
room is equal to many tons. Suppose one of 
you were lying on the floor yonder with a huge 
rock weighing two thousand pounds crushing 
him down ; we should all be horrified. Yet 
this invisible air is pressing every one of our 
bodies with a force of more than two thousand 
pounds. Why is it, then, that we are not 
crushed ? It is for the same reason that the 
fish is able to sink with safety to a depth in 
the sea where it sustains a mass of water above 
it of many tons' weight. The body of the fish 
is covered with minute pores, little threadlike 
openings, which admit the water to the inside 
of every part, and so the pressure from within 
balances that from without. Just as if I take 
a pane of glass in the window and press hard 
against it with my hand, — of course it will 
give way and be broken. But if I reach my 
arm out of the window and press at the same 
time with the other hand equally hard against 
the outside of the pane, the pressure will be 
exactly balanced and the glass will remain un- 



272 Psychology and Ethics 

broken. In the same way, the pores and cav- 
ities of our bodies allow the air to penetrate 
every part, and the pressure is just as great 
from within as from outside, and we are there- 
fore wholly unconscious of it. So that we walk 
about, balancing upon our heads, as it were, 
this vast burden of thousands of pounds, with- 
out ever thinking of its existence. 

Again, consider the force which the earth is 
exerting to bind everything fast to its surface. 
Suppose we should fix an iron ring into the 
wall yonder, and, getting a firm hold of it, 
should attempt to lift the wall, with the roof, 
a foot or an inch. You know, of course, what 
would prevent our budging it a hair's breadth, 
— simply the attraction of gravitation ; words 
easily spoken, but how rarely appreciated! 
Here is something going on between the wall 
and the earth which defies our strength to have 
the least effect on it. We can see nothing 
there except the lifeless, motionless wood and 
stone resting on the equally lifeless ground. 
We may peep under the foundations, but we 
can find nothing gluing the stone and the 
ground together. Yet there is this enormous 
attraction, reaching up like a gigantic hand 
from the earth's centre, holding everything 
down with a grip of iron. What we call the 
heaviest things, stone and lead and so on, are 



The Invisible Part of this World 273 

only the things which this unseen hand grips 
the firmest. Some of the lightest substances, 
feathers for instance, seem to elude its grasp, 
but it is only because the air buoys them up, 
as a stick is buoyed up on the water. Exhaust 
the air from a glass vessel with the air-pump, 
and the feather falls like lead. 

But here in this little lump of glass is an- 
other startling force, all the time at work. We 
can see as we hold it up only a transparent 
mass ; but inside here, embracing every parti- 
cle, from the centre to the circumference, is a 
power at work which would defy the stoutest 
arms in the room to overcome. Suppose you 
grasp each side and try to pull it in two. Why 
is it that you might tug with might and main, 
and yet make no impression on it whatever ? 
You answer, of course, that it is the attraction 
of cohesion, — another very easy word to say, 
but a very amazing thing if we could only 
fairly get hold of it with our minds. Suppose 
we take a small bar of iron as big as your 
wrist, and having fixed one end firmly to the 
floor or the ground, let a horse be fastened by 
a chain to the other end, and undertake to 
pull the bar in two. When you saw the strong 
animal plunging and straining every muscle in 
vain, it would impress you with an idea of 
great power. But there in the little bar would 



274 Psychology and Ethics 

be the far greater power, — a little goblin, as 
it were, sitting inside the iron, and knotting its 
particles together with the strength of twenty 
horses; a little sleepless, motionless goblin, 
sitting there wholly invisible, exerting every 
instant the force of a giant. All around us, in 
the boards of the floor, in the wood of your 
desks, in the bones of your arms and fingers, 
we find this strange force, griping atom to 
atom, so that you may lay your hand on the 
commonest lump of stone or iron, and think it 
is a very ordinary object you are touching, 
while right under the palm of your hand there 
is at work a concealed power sufficient to make 
an earthquake, if it were only so applied. 

But if these unseen forces are wonderful, 
what shall we say of the motions that are taking 
place here in the room ? You all seem to be sit- 
ting here in your chairs quietly enough, yet the 
fact really is that you are flying through space 
at the rate of more than a thousand miles every 
minute. We go a thousand miles every hour 
with the earth's motion round its own axis, and 
68,000 miles every hour in its yearly flight 
round the sun. It is just as if we were to glue 
some wee bit of an insect to the side of a ball, 
and hurl the ball with all our might at some 
object. You know how it goes whirling round 
and on toward the mark at the same time, — 



The Invisible Part of this World 275 

only we are being hurled with a motion a hun- 
dred times more rapid. Suppose I had a 
pistol here, and should fire it at the wall yon- 
der j the bullet would sing through the air with 
such swiftness that you would perceive no in- 
terval between the bang of the powder and 
the thud of the lead in the plaster. Yet we 
are this moment whizzing off to the eastward 
swifter than the pistol ball. You look out of 
the window and see the snowy line of the 
Sierras on the horizon, and before I have had 
time to speak the words we have reached the 
point in space where those white summits were 
as I began this sentence, and are already spin- 
ning on far beyond. It is hard to realize this, 
and do you see why? It is because we are 
used to thinking of rapid motion as something 
that makes the air rush against our faces, while 
stationary objects appear to be passing behind 
us as we go ; whereas in this case we have no 
stationary objects at our side, and the air, in- 
stead of blowing against us, sticks fast to the 
earth and flies along with us. If for an instant 
the atmosphere could be stopped while the 
earth went on, there would be suddenly such a 
blast of wind as would crush this building to 
the ground like the crushing of an egg-shell. 

But it is in ourselves, after all, that we may 
find the most wonderful things in the world. A 



276 Psychology and Ethics 

microcosm, the old sages used to call man, — a 
word which those of you who are studying 
Greek know means a little world ; meaning by 
that that man contains in himself in miniature 
all the forces and elements of the whole world. 
A human body, if you will only think of it, is all 
made up of wonderful forces. Consider the 
mechanism which is incessantly pumping blood 
through our arteries and veins. You see a 
person sitting quietly in his seat, and you would 
never suspect that such a piece of machinery 
was working away inside of him. But there is 
the heart, pump-pump-pumping away, day and 
night, sending in each hour many gallons of 
blood through our systems. And as you may 
see if you watch the circulation in a bat's wing 
under the microscope, the blood does not creep 
slowly along, as we are apt to imagine, but the 
red streams go darting swift as an arrow along 
their slender channels, — into the limbs, down 
to the finger-ends and the feet, and back again 
to the wonderful pumping heart. 

Then the muscular force, — what a strange 
thing that is ! Here is this book lying here, — 
the whole earth, through the attraction of grav- 
itation, is pulling upon that book, tons of solid 
planet holding it down ; and here is my arm, a 
mere piece of bone with a cord of flesh cover- 
ing it, — just such red flesh and white bone as 



The Invisible Part of this World 277 

we see lying powerless in the butcher shops, — 
and all I have to do is to call into action the 
muscular force, and up comes the book, in 
spite of the whole earth's resistance. The brain 
recalls to itself this invisible force, and how 
quickly the earth snatches the book back ! 

Consider, too, what is called the assimilating 
power in our bodies. That is, the power which 
takes up food and digests it and changes it 
into flesh and bone. Here is a strange, invisi- 
ble force in each of us, which takes a little 
bread and meat, and in a few hours' time 
makes it into muscle and brain. There would 
seem to be no similarity between a loaf of 
bread and a man's strength, yet this hidden 
power actually changes one into the other. 
The hungry soldier, who has marched a long 
day without food, and is ready to lie down tired 
out, and wishing the war were over, has his 
good cup of coffee and his beefsteak, and out 
of them this invisible assimilating power makes 
for him strength and courage, and he gets up 
stout and cheery, ready to hurrah for the Pre- 
sident, and to defeat any amount of rebel bat- 
talions. Every moment these vital forces in 
our bodies are at work, repairing the waste 
that is incessantly going on. So that if we 
could see what is to our eyes invisible, we 
should behold in man as the ultimate skeleton, 



278 Psychology and Ethics 

not a bundle of motionless bones, but a living 
fountain of forces, streaming from the brain 
along the intricate web-work of the nerves, so 
rapid as to seem a mere flash of incessant 
motion from head to foot. 

But if these vital forces of the body are won- 
derful, what are we to think of the invisible 
7fimd? Here in each of us is a marvelous 
thing : a thinking mind, a force that never 
pauses, which you cannot stop if you try. Try 
for a moment not to think, and your very idea 
of not thinking is a thought, followed in spite 
of you by some other thought. And here we 
reach what is really ma7t : the body is nothing ; 
horses have just such bodily powers as you and 
I ; they digest food, and have muscles, and 
lungs, and eyes. But here in you and me 
there is something different, — an invisible 
something in us by which we can gain know- 
ledge, and can understand the curious world 
we are living in. Here we can sit in this room, 
and by our minds we can go out of this room, 
and think about distant countries and distant 
times ; can be glad or sorry about events and 
people of past times, long before we were born ; 
can even go off away from this little planet 
Earth altogether, and occupy ourselves with 
far-off worlds, weighing the moon, or measur- 
ing the girth of Jupiter and Mars. And here 



The Invisible Part of this World 279 

is the most difficult of all the invisible things 
to realize. We are all the time thinking of the 
bodies of men and women as their real selves. 
We say such a person is beautiful, or such a 
one ugly, or weak, when in reality the girl 
whose face happens to be homely may be most 
beautiful in spirit, and the boy who seems weak 
or deformed may in his real self, his mind, be 
the most vigorous and graceful of all of us. 
We treasure up photographs of our friends' 
faces as their likenesses, when really a letter 
they have written, or some generous action 
they have performed, is a much truer picture 
of them, because it shows us something of their 
real self, the invisible mind. When we look 
at a person's head, we do not see the real per- 
son. We only see a skull, made up for the 
most part of lime ; and if we could peep under 
the skull, we should only see a ball of whitish 
substance called the brain ; and we might 
search through and through and discover no- 
thing of the wonderful mind. We must try to 
get rid of this idea that the body is the person. 
We must think of a man not as a body with a 
soul in it, but as a soul with a body round it. 
Perhaps we sometimes feel proud of some bod- 
ily superiority to others, or feel pained and 
hurt about some physical defect or awkward- 
ness. But that is very foolish. It is just as if 



280 Psychology and Ethics 

you were traveling on horseback, and should 
meet some neighbor better mounted than you 
were : you would never think of being ashamed 
or feeling badly because he was riding a hand- 
somer horse. And just so the mind is, as it 
were, mounted on the body, as a man is on a 
horse ; and it ought to govern the body (which 
just now in this world happens to be carrying 
it about), just as the good rider does his steed. 
And as we laugh at a man who lets his horse 
run away with him, just so we ought to see that 
it is ridiculous for people to let their physical 
aches, and troubles, and pleasures run away 
with their minds. 

You see we must get used to thinking of 
these invisible things as real, or we shall go 
through life without half appreciating what a 
beautiful world this is. We have no business 
to go about only half attending to what is all 
around us. Many people go through life as 
snails do, carrying their whole world on their 
backs ; seeing and thinking of nothing except 
clothes and food, and their little daily circum- 
stances of pleasure or trouble. If we mean 
to be anything higher than a sort of human 
snails, we must go about, not only with our eyes 
open, but with our minds open. We need to 
be constantly jogging ourselves on the elbow 
and reminding ourselves to notice this thing 



The Invisible Part of this JVorld 281 

and that, or else we are apt to forget the ex- 
istence of everything except what is held up 
plainly before our eyes. We must be con- 
stantly recollecting that because a thing is in- 
visible, it is none the less real. For instance, 
if we go out into the street now in broad day- 
light, and look up at the sky, we do not think 
of there being anything there above us except 
what we see, the blue sky and the white clouds. 
And yet we know, if we will only think of it, 
that even now overhead there are all the beau- 
tiful burning stars, Orion and the Pleiades and 
the Great Dipper, wheeling across the sky, just 
as fair and solemn as at midnight. 

You know the earth is often spoken of as 
the common habitation of beasts and birds and 
men, all living in the same world. But think 
what a false idea this is ! The spider only in- 
habits its little cobweb in the corner, seeing 
and knowing nothing beyond ; while to us the 
whole world is given to live in. We look into 
the stones and rocks, and read there the his- 
tory of our planet ; we investigate the most 
hidden forces that are moving throughout na- 
ture ; we are interested at the same moment in 
things in Virginia, in Europe, in Asia, — in the 
times of the Greeks, and of the Puritans, and 
of our own heroes of to-day. As the insect 
reaches out with its long tentacles and feels 



282 Psychology and Ethics 

about its little world, so we go feeling about 
with our restless minds, reaching out through 
the whole universe ; down through the micro- 
scope into the invisible atoms and origins of all 
living things, up through the telescope among 
the boundless spaces where the only landmarks 
are the innumerable stars. 

We must not feel, either, any of that dread 
of invisible things which is natural to ignorant 
people. You know that in very early ages of 
the world, when men were barbarous and igno- 
rant, they invented all sorts of fables about 
evil spirits, and goblins, and ghosts, and all 
manner of such nonsense. They felt that there 
were forces in action all around them which 
they could not see and understand, and there- 
fore they were afraid of them, and imagined 
various foolish terrors to be frightened at. It 
is just so with us sometimes when we lie awake 
in the dark : we have a feeling of dread, sim- 
ply because we can't plainly see what is around 
us. But we must remember that it is simply 
our ignorance that makes us timid. If we 
could see things clearly just as they are, we 
should be wise enough to see that everything 
in the world is meant for our good, that so 
long as we go about with reverent hearts and 
pure minds, all the powers and forces of the 
world are on our side, guarding us from harm. 



The Invisible Part of this World 283 

Even in the old ignorant times, we can see 
what a healthy, sunshiny sort of people the 
English were, from the fact that their mytho- 
logy rather ran to benevolent fairies and " good 
folk," as they used to call their imaginary 
sprites, instead of the fierce demons which the 
coarse and brutal minds of some other peoples 
conjured up. 

I don't think it is often that we find any- 
thing very well worth reading in newspapers; 
but I read a little incident in a newspaper a 
while ago which pleased me. It told about 
a little baby that was creeping about on the 
carpet one morning, when the sunshine was 
streaming in through the window, and lying 
broad and warm on the floor. The little child, 
after creeping around it for some minutes, 
laughing out its innocent delight at the sun- 
beam's cheerfulness and warmth, finally put its 
little mouth down and kissed it. And just so, 
I thought, we ought to feel toward all Nature, 

— we ought to love it, not fear it. The more 
broadly we live, and the more deeply we look 
into the kind, beautiful eyes of Nature, the 
more we shall feel that while we are pure and 
good the whole universe is in harmony with us, 
and all its vast forces, seen and unseen, are 
only so many guardian angels helping us along, 

— so many pleasant friends, helping us to be 



284 Psychology and Ethics 

wise and happy ; our little aches and pains are 
only meant to teach us necessary lessons ; and 
even if we die, it is only setting us free, lead- 
ing us to some other even more beautiful world, 
of which we at least know this, as the old Ro- 
man emperor wrote, that whatever it is, we are 
sure there will be no lack of God there, to take 
care of us. The more we know of the things 
about us, and of each other, the better we shall 
understand, as Coleridge says, that 

*' He prayeth best who loveth best 
All things both great and small ; 
For the dear God who loveth us 
He made and loveth all." 




CDucation 

SHOULD A COLLEGE EDUCATE? 

N the "American language" (which is 
simply the most modern English) a 
college and a university are two dif- 
ferent things. The terms are sometimes con- 
founded, in loose popular speech, but the best 
usage in this country shows an increasing ten- 
dency toward a sharp distinction between them. 
A failure to apprehend this distinction clearly, 
and a consequent notion that a college is only 
a little university, or a university only a large 
college, has sometimes given rise to odd doc- 
trine as to what a college should teach. 

In their original signification the words are 
not widely different : the imiversitas signifying 
merely a " corporate whole," in law ; the colle- 
gium^ a *' society of colleagues." But the term 
university, in its development in Europe and 
this country, and the term college, in its devel- 
opment in this country especially, have become 
widely differentiated. That which is properly 
called a university has its own distinct pur- 



286 Education 

pose, and consequently its own proper methods 
and appliances. That which is properly called 
a college has a different purpose, and its meth- 
ods and appliances are consequently entirely 
different. 

Ideally, a university is a place where any- 
body may learn everything. And this, whether 
it be as knowledge, properly speaking, or as 
skill. Actually, however, as found existing at 
present (since few persons after leaving col- 
lege wish to study beyond the requirements of 
a bread-occupation), a university consists of a 
central college, surrounded by a cluster of pro- 
fessional or technical schools, where special 
branches are pursued, chiefly with reference to 
some particular calHng. 

A college, on the other hand, is a place where 
young people, whatever their future occupation 
is to be, may first of all receive that more or 
less complete development which we call a 
" liberal education." ^ 

1 In one or two instances our state charters have em- 
ployed these terms, university and college, in such a way 
as to confuse any rational or usual distinction between 
them. The State of California, for instance, has a " Uni- 
versity of California," consisting of a College of Letters, 
a College of Agriculture, a College of Mining, etc. Of 
these only the College of Letters answers to the accepted 
sense of the term " college," the others being what are 
more properly called professional or technical "schools." 



Should a College Educate? 287 

The cliaracter of the college course, then, 
should be determined purely with reference to 
the distinct purpose of the college. The hu- 
man mind being many-sided, the college under- 
takes to aid its development on all the lines of 
its natural growth. The tendency of modern 
life, moreover, with its extreme division of la- 
bor, being to force one or two powers of the 
mind at the expense of the rest, the aim of the 
college is to forestall this one-sided effect by 
giving the whole man a fair chance beforehand. 
While the special or professional schools of the 
university provide that a person may go as far 
as possible on some one line of knowledge, 
which constitutes his specialty,^ or of that com- 

The use of the words at Cambridge (U. S.) illustrates 
their almost universal application in this country : " Har- 
vard University " consisting (in the language of the an- 
nual catalogue) of " Harvard College, the Divinity School, 
the Law School, the Lawrence Scientific School," etc. 

1 The Johns Hopkins University, at Baltimore, fur- 
nishes one example, in this country, of a "university" 
in somewhat the sense of the term as used abroad. It 
does not, it is true, exclude college work, but it main- 
tains chairs of original research, and at the same time 
provides advanced instruction for graduate students on 
special lines of study, other than those of the usual pro- 
fessional schools. It is to be hoped that the fact of its 
carrying on undergraduate college work does not indi- 
cate any danger of its being checked in its full career, 
through some possible unripeness of its public for its 



288 Education 

bination of knowledge and skill which consti- 
tutes his profession, the college provides that 
he shall get such a complete possession of 
himself — in all his powers : mind, body, and 
that total of qualities known as "character" — 
as is essential to the highest success in any 
specialty or profession whatever. He may get 
this broad preparation elsewhere than in col- 
lege. It may come through private study. It 
may come sometimes — but only to men of ex- 
traordinary endowments — from the discipline 
of life itself. But to the ordinary man, the 
" average man," it comes most surely and most 
easily through a college course. Once having 
it, from one source or another, a man no doubt 
fits himself best to serve the world by perfect- 
ing his knowledge and skill in some single 
direction ; but without some such broad pre- 
liminary development, some such " liberal edu- 
cation," he will fail not only of his best possible 
special work, but — what is worst of all — he 
will assuredly fail of that best service which 
any man can do for the community, the living 
in it, whatever his profession, as a complete 
and roundly moulded man. He will fail (to 
use Mr. Spencer's excellent phrase) of " com- 
plete living." He will have entered the world 

more advanced work, and warped toward an ordinary 
university with a college and professional schools only. 



Should a College Educate? 289 

without being equipped for that great common 
profession, the profession of Uving — under- 
neath and above his particular calling — the 
intellectual life. 

But (it may be asked) why may not the uni- 
versity, through some one of its special schools, 
furnish this culture without the need of a col- 
lege ? Because a man is too complex an organ- 
ism to get complete growth in any single region 
of study, or by any one line of exercises. 

But, at least (it may further be asked), might 
not the ideal university, with its whole circle of 
knowledges, professional and otherwise, give 
this complete culture .? In other words, why 
should not the college add to its course all 
kinds of knowledges, and so itself become an 
ideal university, where anybody might learn 
everything ? It is the theory implied in this 
question that produces the tendency toward 
unlimited " electives " in the college course. 
There should be no difficulty in seeing why 
this is an irrational tendency, however attrac- 
tive it may seem at first sight to the public. 
It is irrational because the time actually given 
to college study is no more than four years ; in 
this time only a few subjects can be studied ; 
and the very essence of the function of the col- 
lege is, therefore, that it should select among 
the numberless possible subjects those which 



290 Education 

promise the greatest educating force. For we 
reach, at this point in the discussion, a fact 
that underlies the whole system of any right 
education — a fact persistently ignored by 
many persons having to do with educational 
affairs, particularly in the lower schools and in 
remote communities, and on the ignorance of 
which no end of educational blunders have 
been built. It is the fact that, while every 
possible knowledge and skill is useful for one 
purpose or another, 7iot all are equally useful 
for the purposes of education. The college, 
therefore, must select such studies as are most 
useful for its own purposes. So far as the uni- 
versity undertakes to prescribe any such gen- 
eral or culture course, it becomes a college. 
So far as the college forgets to do this, in de- 
ference to notions of a " practical " training, or 
of the magnificence of a great cloud of elec- 
tives, it does not become a university — for 
that, in the nature of the case, is impossible ; 
but it fails of its true function as a college, and 
is no longer either the one thing or the other. 

The ideal of a great university where any- 
body might learn everything has a peculiar 
charm for the imagination. Bacon sketched 
the large outlines of such an establishment in 
his " New Atlantis ; " and ever since his day 
we have come to see more and more clearly 



Should a College Educate? 291 

that knowledge does indeed make prosperity, 
whether for peoples or for individuals. No- 
thing can be more charming, then, than the 
thought of a great central institution where the 
last word on every subject might be heard; 
where the foremost scientist in every science, 
the foremost craftsman in every handicraft, 
should impart the entirety of his acquisitions 
or his dexterity to all who cared to seek it. 
Such a university ought, it would seem, to be 
accessible to every community in this modern 
world. 

But all this would not give us a college. 
That we have only when we have a company 
of competent scholars providing a course of 
general preliminary training ; a course selected 
with reference to its particular end of producing 
broadly educated men. The university, taking 
the man as he is, would propose to leave him 
as he is, except for the acquisition of a certain 
special knowledge or skill. The college, taking 
the youth as he is, proposes to make of him 
something that he is not. It proposes no less 
a miracle, in fact, than the changing of a crude 
boy into an educated man. A miracle, — yet 
every day sees it more and more successfully 
performed. 

An educated man — what is it that we un- 
derstand by the phrase ? If it would not be 



292 Education 

easy to set down all that it connotes in our 
various minds, we should probably agree that 
it includes, among other things, such quali- 
ties as these : a certain largeness of view ; an 
acquaintance with the intellectual life of 
the world ; the appreciation of principles ; the 
power and habit of independent thought ; the 
freedom from personal provincialism, and the 
recognition of the other point of view ; an un- 
derlying nobleness of intention ; the persist- 
ence in magnanimous aims. If there has not 
yet been found the system of culture which 
will give this result every time and with all 
sorts of material, it may at least be asserted 
that a course of study — whether in college or 
out — somewhat corresponding to the course 
pursued at our best colleges has a visible ten- 
dency to produce this result. Whether it might 
be produced, also, by some entirely different 
course is certainly a question not to be rashly 
answered in the negative. All we can say is, 
that any course which has as yet been proposed 
as a substitute has proved, on experiment, to 
have serious defects in comparison with it. 
Our wisest plan is to hold fast what we already 
know to be good studies, making further exper- 
iments with candor and fairness ; avoiding, on 
the one hand, the timid pre-judgments of those 
who are afraid of all that is not ancient and 



Should a College Educate? 293 

established, and, on the other hand, the crude 
enthusiasms of those half-educated persons who 
think that nothing old can be good, and no- 
thing new can be bad. 

Two principal proposals of change in the 
college course have been made. One is that 
the modern languages should be substituted 
for the ancient. So far as the complete sub- 
stitution has been tried, most observers would 
probably agree that the experiment has failed. 
In other words, more persons are found to have 
studied modern languages without having be- 
come "educated" persons by that means than 
are found to have studied the classics without 
that result. College observers, unbiased by 
any personal interest as teachers on either side, 
would probably be found nearly unanimous as 
to this point. Without discussing the question 
theoretically here, we would only insist upon 
this : that, so far as any change of this kind is 
made, it be made only on the ground of greater 
serviceableness for purely educational pur- 
poses, as being better fitted to " educe the 
man " — the only test of studies with which the 
college has anything whatever to do. Prob- 
ably Mill's answer, or counter-question, will 
eventually be found the wisest one as between 
the classical and the modern languages and 
literatures : " Why not both .? " 



294 Education 

The other principal proposal of change is 
the substitution of natural science in place of 
the "humanities." To the addition of a cer- 
tain amount of natural science, enough, cer- 
tainly, to impart its admirable methods of re- 
search, and, what is more, its admirable spirit 
of uncompromising adhesion to the exact 
truth, no one is likely to object. But when it 
is proposed to make any radical substitution of 
the material studies for the human studies, 
making courses (as has been done) without 
Latin, Greek, Literature, Logic, Philosophy, 
Ancient History, etc., supplying their places 
with the natural sciences, it is well to consider 
carefully, first, the results of the experiment so 
far as it has been tried ; and, secondly, certain 
well-established principles concerning the hu- 
man mind in its relation to studies. As to 
ascertained results, it is to be said that for 
some time now there have been, in several of 
our institutions of learning, courses having 
these contrasted characters running side by 
side. We will not here offer any testimony of 
our own as to the comparative results of the 
two in the production of broadly educated men. 
We would only suggest to those who are in 
any doubt upon the matter, or who have any 
radical change of college courses in view, to 
look into the results of the experiment for 



Should a College Educate? 295 

themselves, and to take the testimony of those 
who have had opportunity to observe them. 
The effect of such an examination will be likely 
to produce hearty agreement with an editorial 
writer in a late number of '' Science," who 
remarks that "the introduction of scientific 
studies in our educational systems has not 
brought about the millennium which was ex- 
pected." Much good, no doubt, they have 
done, when introduced in proper proportion. 
Their methods have certainly influenced favor- 
ably the methods of the older studies. But, 
after all, we come back to the truth that, of the 
two groups of studies, both indispensable, the 
humanities furnish the greater growth-power 
for the mind, because they are the product and 
expression of mind.-^ 

It cannot be too carefully kept in view that, 
in any such comparison of the natural sciences 
with the humanities, we take into account only 

1 Sometimes we hear the curious remark made, per- 
haps by one of the weaker brethren among those very 
useful persons, the dealers in second-hand science (Pop- 
ular Science), that the book of nature is the expression 
of the mind of God, while other books only express the 
mind of man. But it does not require great acumen to 
perceive that the mind of man and all its productions 
are also the work and the expression of the same Author 
— his Bible, one might say, to carry on the figure, while 
material nature is only his spelling-book. 



296 Education 

their educational value. The sensitive loyalty 
of scientific men to their specialties, a very 
pleasant thing to see, sometimes seems to 
blind them to this distinction between intrinsic 
values and educational values. They should 
remember that no slight upon the intrinsic 
value of any science is implied in the doubt as 
to its comparative educational value. There 
are many things of enormous usefulness to the 
world in other ways, whose examination could 
contribute next to nothing toward the develop- 
ment of mind. Iron, for example, constitutes 
almost the framework of civilization ; but this 
does not at all imply that metallurgy, as a col- 
lege study, would have any considerable edu- 
cating force. On the other hand, there are 
many subjects of study whose application to 
the ordinary business of life might seem very 
remote indeed, yet whose power to " educe the 
man " is found to be very great. The calculus, 
or the Antigone, might never be of any "use" 
to the man, in the superficial sense of the word, 
yet they might have been the very meat and 
drink of his intellectual growth. The natural 
sciences may well be satisfied with the crowns 
of honor the world must always give them for 
their royal contributions to our mental and 
material existence, without expecting to be 
made exclusively, also, our nurses and school- 



Should a College Educate? 297 

masters. The fitness for those humbler but 
necessary functions must be determined wholly 
on other grounds than that of value, however 
priceless it be, to the world for other purposes. 
Both experiment and reflection seem to point 
more and more decisively to the view that 
mind, on the whole, grows chiefly through con- 
tact with mind. And accordingly, what are 
called the liberal courses of study, formed 
largely of those studies which bring to the stu- 
dent the magnetic touch of the human spirit in 
its dealings with life, seem to show more vital- 
izing power, — seem actually to produce, on 
experiment, more broadly educated men than 
what may be called the illiberal courses, formed 
without these human studies. Yet here, again, 
" Why not both ? " is the best solution, so far 
as we can effect it. For the natural sciences 
have, undeniably, certain admirable influences 
in education. They are free from any encour- 
agement of morbid moods. They teach the 
mind to " hug its fact." There is little minis- 
try to brooding egotism in them ; except that 
sometimes a very callow pupil may for a while 
feel that the mastery of a few rudiments some- 
how covers him prematurely with the glory that 
properly belongs to the great discoverers ; but 
from this stage he soon recovers. There is 
always a freshness and out-of-door healthful- 



298 Education 

ness about even the simplest work in natural 
science that makes it a charming study, for the 
lower schools, especially. Mr. Spencer has 
well pointed out its adaptation, on this score, 
even to the period of childhood. It is, in fact, 
so far as it includes only the observation of 
outside nature, an invigorating play of the 
mind, rather than a laborious work. And the 
need of this health-giving intellectual play we 
never outgrow. 

But the attractiveness of these natural studies 
must not be allowed to blind us to the need,' 
when it comes to forming a course for the 
maturer mind, of more abstract and complex 
subjects. The sciences in their higher and 
severer regions, where the mind of man has 
more and more mingled itself with the mere 
facts of nature, as in wide comparative views 
and the induction of great principles ; and espe- 
cially the purely human studies, the languages, 
histories, philosophies, literatures, — these must 
be the food and light of the larger growth of 
the mind. The law of intellectual development 
in education seems to be analogous to a cer- 
tain familiar law of physical growth in lower 
organisms. The very lowest, the vegetable, is 
able to nourish itself directly on the crude 
inorganic elements of nature : the higher, the 
animal, can only be nourished on matter al- 



Should a College Educate ? 299 

ready organized by life. Somewhat so, appar- 
ently, with the growth of intellect: while the 
simpler faculties, such as we share with other 
animals, are able to get their full development 
from the sights and sounds of nature alone, the 
deeper feelings and the higher intellectual pro- 
cesses can be best nourished on the outcome 
of the human spirit — nature and life as organ- 
ized, or reorganized, by the mind of man. 

In meeting the public on this matter of the 
course of study, the college finds itself con- 
fronted with two or three false notions, so in- 
veterate that they may well be classed as popu- 
lar delusions. Each of these, like most popular 
delusions, has crystallized round a convenient 
phrase. 

One such notion is that the choice of studies 
for any given youth should be governed by his 
own natural predispositions. In other words, 
he should " follow his bent." This has a plau- 
sible sound, yet to apply it to the college 
course would be to ignore the very purpose of 
the college. When it comes to selecting a life 
occupation, a specialty for study or practice, 
such as the various schools of the university 
undertake to furnish, a youth should, no doubt, 
choose according to his taste and talent. But 
to choose on that ground alone in his prepara- 
tory culture-course would simply magnify any 



300 Education 

lack of balance in his original nature. As well 
might one advise a boy at the gymnasium to 
devote himself to those exercises in which he 
naturally excelled, to the neglect of all that 
found out his weak points ; if the arms were 
feeble, to use only the muscles of the thighs ; 
if the thighs were undeveloped, to use only the 
arms. The purpose of the college is to do for 
mind and character what the gymnasium does 
for the physical powers : to build up the man 
all round. If the student " hates mathematics," 
it is probably because his mind is naturally 
weak on the side of abstract reasoning, and the 
hated study is therefore the very study he 
needs. If he has a lofty disdain of literature, 
it is very likely only an evidence of some lack 
of that side of culture somewhere in his ances- 
try. There is nothing sacred about a "bent." 
So far from being an indication of Providence, 
it is apt to be a mere indication of hereditary 
defect. If we look at it from the side of its 
being a predisposition to weakness in some 
particular directions, a bent away from certain 
lines of study (the form in which it chiefly 
shows itself in college), we can see that the 
sooner it is repaired by a generous mental diet, 
the better for the man and for the race to 
whose ideal perfection he and his posterity are 
to contribute. Perhaps the greatest danger to 



Should a College Educate? 301 

which the higher education is at present ex- 
posed is that of spreading before the student 
a vast number of miscellaneous subjects, all 
recommended as equally valuable, and inviting 
him to choose according to his bent. The 
result naturally is that the average boy follows 
that universal bent of human nature toward 
the course that offers him the easiest time. If 
this course happens to include strong studies, 
easy only because he is specially interested in 
them, the harm is not so great ; but if it con- 
sists chiefly of light studies, introduced into the 
curriculum only because somebody was there 
to teach them, and somebody else wanted them 
taught (and perhaps a little, too, because each 
counts one in a catalogue), then the harm is 
enormous. This becomes evident enough if 
we use (as we may for brevity's sake be per- 
mitted to do) the rednctio ad absiirdum of an 
extreme illustration ; if we suppose that some 
language having a great history and a great 
literature, the Greek, for example, is rejected 
in favor of some barbarous tongue embodying 
neither history nor literature ; say, for example, 
the Pawnee or the Eskimo ; or if we suppose 
that for exercises in writing and reasoning is 
substituted the collecting of postage-stamps of 
all nations, or practice on the guitar. Far 
short of any such violent extremes, there are 



302 Education 

perfectly well recognized differences between 
the efficacy of one study and another in edu- 
cating a college student. And it would seem 
wiser to trust the choice to the governing body 
of the college than to an inexperienced lad, 
swayed by some momentary whim, or by the 
class-tradition of the " easiness " of one sub- 
ject or another ; in other words, by his natural 
bent. 

Another popular delusion concerning the 
college course hinges on a common misuse of 
the word practical. It properly signifies effec- 
tual in attainifig one's end. So, transferring the 
term to persons, we call him a practical man 
who habitually employs such means. A " prac- 
tical study," then, is in reality a study which is 
calculated to effect the end we have in view in 
pursuing it. And since the end in view of a 
college study is purely and simply the develop- 
ment of the mind and character, any study is a 
practical study just to the extent that it is 
effectual for this end. And any study is a 
completely unpractical study, no matter how 
useful it may be for other purposes, if it is 
ineffectual for this. The real virus of people's 
misuse of this word lies in their taking it to 
mean, not effectual for one's end, whatever 
it be, but effectual for that particular end 
which to them happens to seem the chief end 



Should a College Educate? 3 03 

of man. If a man's one aim is to have a suc- 
cessful farm, he is apt to consider all studies 
unpractical that do not bear directly on agri- 
culture. If the great object of another is to 
gain public office, to him that study alone 
seems " practical " which directly subserves 
this end. Accordingly, there are always found 
well-meaning persons, not conversant with edu- 
cational affairs, who consider the best studies, 
and those which for college purposes are most 
practical, as being completely unpractical ; and 
who will always be trying to crowd in upon its 
courses those so-called practical studies, which, 
for the ends the college has in view, would 
prove as unpractical as studies could be. 

It furnishes a favorite phrase for those who 
thus misconceive the purpose of a liberal edu- 
cation, to say that it fails to fit a man for 
the " struggle of life." If the phrase means the 
making of a living, this objection certainly 
seems not well founded. Any one's daily ob- 
servation of common life will enable him to 
answer the question whether or not liberally 
educated men are, relatively to the rest of the 
community, making a comfortable living. 
When, how^ever, we come to notice that some 
of those who are fondest of this complaint 
against the college course, on their owm ac- 
count, do not seem to stand in any conspicu- 



304 Education 

ous need of a living, we are led to suspect that 
they may mean something else by the" struggle 
of life." Perhaps some mean by this phrase the 
strife for sudden wealth, or for political office, 
prizes for which, in fact, a good deal of violent 
*' struggling " is done. So far from inciting 
men to any such feverish struggle, it may be 
hoped that the higher education will always 
raise them above the disposition for it, or the 
temptation to it. Public reputation and public 
office should, we are beginning once more to 
believe, " seek the man ; " and they may be 
depended on to find him as fast as he deserves 
them. If not in the scramble and struggle of 
certain ignoble regions of effort, at least in the 
legitimate pursuit of any dignified career, men 
succeed in the long run by means of their 
character and intelligence ; and the more com- 
pletely these have been developed, the surer 
the success. Such a completeness the present 
college course is generally admitted to have an 
observed tendency, at least, to produce. 

However much it may lack of perfection, 
the common criticisms upon it seem wide of 
the mark : whether it be the charge that there 
are not enough electives for every possible 
taste or bent ; or that the studies are not prac- 
tical enough ; or that they fail to fit a man for 
the " struggle of life." For these complaints 



Should a College Educate? 305 

are all based on the same fundamental miscon- 
ception, the supposition, namely, that the pur- 
pose of the college is merely to equip the man ; 
when in reality its purpose is, first of all, to 
evolve the man. They all overlook this cen- 
tral idea of the higher education : that its aim 
is not merely to add something to the man 
from without, as convenience or equipment ; 
but to produce a certain change in him from 
within as growth and power. The misconcep- 
tion seems all the more short-sighted, in that 
it fails to perceive that the most valuable 
equipment for any work whatever that may 
afterward be undertaken is found in this very 
breadth and depth of preparatory develop- 
ment. 

Two permanent human desires, on the sur- 
face antagonistic, but at bottom perfectly re- 
concilable, have all along been at work in 
moulding systems of education. One is the 
desire to be much, or the desire for attainment; 
the other is the desire to get much, or the 
desire for acquisition. As we look at young 
people, we find that we have both these desires 
for their future. We would have them amount 
to a great deal, in themselves : we may call 
this our aspiration for them ; and we would 
have them get on in life : we may call this our 
ambition for them. As we look at the comma- 



306 Education 

nity we feel these same two desires : we would 
have it a community of wise and noble per- 
sons ; and we would have it a prosperous com- 
munity. 

Now our educational work has taken on one 
character or another, according as aspiration or 
ai?ibition has been most prominently in mind. 
Some, perceiving that we are all "people of 
whom more might have been made," have been 
most impressed with the importance of lifting 
men's personal lives to higher planes. Others 
have felt most the need of equipping men for 
special efficiency in the various callings of life. 
Not the college only, but the entire field of 
education, from kindergarten to university, has 
been a battle-ground where these two ideas, 
unwisely supposing themselves natural foes, 
have continually fought. But both these de- 
sires are in the right. Seen in the larger view 
there is no possible casus belli between them. 
They are reconciled the moment it is seen to 
be true that the completest development is 
itself the most valuable equipment. 

Fortunately, the colleges have for the most 
part taken this larger view, and have cour- 
ageously kept their courses in accord with it, 
in spite of efforts from outside to warp them 
from their true purpose of providing an educa- 
tion for men, to that of providing an occupation 



Should a College Educate? 307 

for them ; and corresponding efforts to have 
the educative studies removed, and occupative 
studies substituted in their stead. 

That the college course will be further im- 
proved, as it has been constantly improving in 
the past, no one can doubt. The important 
thing is that changes, when they are made, 
should be made with a clear understanding of 
the purpose of the college, and in furtherance 
of this. It would not be best (if, once more, a 
violently absurd example may be pardoned) 
that Eskimo should be substituted for Greek 
on a vicious and sophistical ground; such as, 
for instance, that a young man might some 
time go on a diplomatic mission to Greenland, 
and might find it a convenient language to 
have. Nor should practice on the guitar be 
substituted for literary exercises, on any such 
ground as that it is well received in society, 
and, for purposes of instruction in the female 
seminaries, might at any moment be a valuable 
equipment for the struggle of life. 

The greatest advance in college work is 
probably to be expected from improved meth- 
ods of treatment, rather than from radical 
changes of the subjects of the course. Much 
of the elementary work in the languages, both 
ancient and modern, will no doubt eventually 
be relegated to the lower schools. More and 



308 Education 

more the classics will be taught as literatures. 
The same change, it may be hoped, will some 
time invade even the modern language courses, 
so that they will have less of the Ollendorff 
character, the mere conversational drill, con- 
ceived as being useful or ornamental for the 
" struggle," and more of the character of an 
intellectual study of the modern European 
mind in its history and literature. So also in 
the natural sciences, the lower schools will 
doubtless one day do a large part of what now 
the colleges are doing; much of that mere 
observation and memory, namely, which is not 
beyond the capacity of the ordinary boy or 
girl of high-school age. 

One college study there is, in particular, 
which may be expected to make great advances 
in its scope and methods. It is a study which 
has for a long time appeared on all the cata- 
logues, but which, so far as any adequate de- 
velopment is concerned, is still in its infancy. 
This study, the History of English Literature, 
has too largely consisted in the mere memo- 
rizing of disconnected facts and dates as found 
in some one or two text-books. And so far as 
the real authors of our literature have been 
studied at all, it has been with much too exclu- 
sive a regard to philology. Even in this com- 
paratively superficial aspect of the subject, its 



Should a College Educate? 3 09 

study has been confined, commonly, to a few 
poets of the early period. The outside shell 
of literature, the language, has been taught 
with much acumen and nice scholarship ; but 
the substance, the thing itself, has been neg- 
lected. It remains to be seen what educating 
force there will prove to be in the proper study 
of this subject when it shall include the history 
of English thought, of which English literature 
is only the expression ; and when it shall bring 
the student face to face with the best minds of 
modern as well as of ancient times. 



JLife 

WANTED — A FRIEND 



E hear of people's seeking by public 
advertisement for a suitable partner 
in marriage, but who ever heard of 
any one's advertising for a friend ? Yet why 
not ? Every one, it is likely, has in mind some 
more or less vague ideal of the absolutely 
perfect comrade. May he not be supposed 
to exist somewhere, and to be in the habit 
of reading a daily newspaper or a monthly 
magazine ? Go to ! let us seek him, then, 
by appropriate advertisement. Something in 
this wise would it run ? " Wanted, a Friend ! 
The undersigned, having existed in compar- 
ative solitude long enough to experience a 
pretty keen desire for * some one to whom to 
say, " How sweet is solitude ! " ' and having as 
yet met no one who exactly satisfies his idea, 
would beg hereby to announce his need. The 
applicant must be rather old, in order to be 
fitted to give advice — a limited amount of it 



Wanted — A Friend 3 11 

— wisely ; and at the same time rather young, 
in order to receive it in liberal quantity and in 
a meek frame of mind. He must be of medium 
height, intellectually, and in the enjoyment of 
robust spiritual health. A written guarantee 
must be given of freedom from all contagious 
defects of character. He must be a thoroughly 
disillusioned and ' advanced ' person, and yet 
be able to sympathize with any little illusions 
or superstitions of the subscriber. His heart 
must be full of love for men in the abstract, 
but entirely devoid, as yet, of affection for any 
particular one of them. He should, however, 
be able to exhibit satisfactory scars of early 
love-affairs, and a more or less scorched aspect 
of spirit from some previous period of welt- 
schmerz. Thus he will be ready to shed furtive 
tears at any pathetic fragments of autobiogra- 
phy the subscriber may mingle in his conversa- 
tion. He will also be expected to look unut- 
terable things when his own past in general is 
alluded to, but never to mention any of it in 
tiresome detail. His memory must be enriched 
with portions of the subscriber's writings, which 
he will quote on frequent occasions with a happy 
spontaneity ; and he must hold the unbiased 
opinion that his friend is the greatest violin 
amateur, marine painter, poet, polo player, and 
master of English prose style of our own or any 



312 Life 

other time. He must be on similar intimate 
terms with several other equally, or almost 
equally, important personages, whose private 
affairs he will communicate, and whom he will 
backbite to the subscriber in an entertaining 
manner. The applicant must undertake that, 
when they dine together at restaurants, he will 
never order the viands, in return for which 
concession he will from time to time be per- 
mitted to pay the bill. In walking on public 
streets, the applicant will carry his face well 
turned round and his ears pricked up toward 
the subscriber, so as to hear him easily without 
forcing him to deviate from the fixed carriage 
of his own head, so necessary to his conception 
of himself as a masterful and positive charac- 
ter. The same rule will be adhered to in con- 
versing together in the cars, especially when 
the subscriber chooses to keep his own face 
turned away toward the window, and still to 
continue speaking in his ordinary low and dig- 
nified tone of voice. The applicant must have 
inherited or acquired a fondness for hearing 
manuscript read, and will never commit the 
indiscretion of attempting to read any of his 
own. For this and other good reasons, — 
N. B., — no person of the literary class need 
apply." 

Yet, seriously, if one cannot exactly publish 



Wanted — A Friend 313 

an advertisement for the purpose, might there 
not be ways, open to persons even of the most 
sensitive taste, of extending the possibilities of 
intimate human relations beyond the small 
circle of haphazard association ? It is a curi- 
ous thing to reflect on, that this connection of 
two persons in friendship, while it is one of 
the most important facts in their lives, is one 
of the things left most completely to chance. 
We do not go out, some fine morning, and 
examine all the diverse characters in our envi- 
ronment, and deliberately choose this or that 
one for a friend. It is left rather to mere 
" accident, blind contact, or strong necessity of 
loving." A natural reason for this, it may be 
said, is that die case of friendship is unique 
among human relations in the fact that the 
choice must necessarily be mutual. It would 
be awkward, that is to say, if, after making a 
deliberate examination of the whole field, we 
should choose, and not be chosen. Another 
difficulty in the way of wisely making a free 
selection among any great number of persons is 
that, after all, however wide our circle may hap- 
pen to be, it is only wide relatively to circles 
which are very narrow. The largest round of 
acquaintance has but a small circumference in 
the great mass of humanity. With the greatest 
number of those included, moreover, it covers 



314 Life 

but a "speaking acquaintance." The most 
experienced and the most widely circulated of 
us have been able to " summer and winter " 
but a very few people. Sometimes I think the 
only men I really know are those who were in 
college with me. This is not on the principle 
^^ in vino vei'itas^^^ but on another principle that 
might well be embodied in a Latin maxim, if it 
is not, ^^ ifi Juventute Veritas ;^^ which is not 
quite the same as sa3dng that " children and 
fools speak the truth." This is probably the 
real reason, by the way, that all through life 
there are never any friends like the college 
friends, — there are never any whom we know 
so through and through ; and out of perfect 
knowledge comes the only perfect trust. 

Whatever the difficulties in the way of a 
wider reach of friendships, it does not seem 
reasonable that we should be so shut up to the 
small geographical limitations of our village or 
city, or "set." Why might not people seek 
out friends for their friends ? There would be 
nothing odious about that sort of match-mak- 
ing. I know and love a man in California, for 
example, who is just suited to a man I know 
and love in Berlin. Why do I not bring them 
together ? When one prints a book, or even a 
magazine article, and some kindred spirit, 
hitherto unknown, is courageous enough to 



Wanted — A Friend 315 

follow his sensible first impulse (instead of let- 
ting that sullen goblin, the sober second 
thought, fling cold water all over it), and writes 
to say he likes it, why may not this sometimes 
be followed up, and become the basis of some- 
thing worth while ? (Of course there are al- 
ways ear-marks in any such letter, to distin- 
guish that of him who writes because he likes 
your thought and that of him who writes be- 
cause he likes to say so.) In some such ways 
the half-souls that Plato tells about might find 
their other halves. Or the quarter-souls might 
find their other three quarters ; for was not 
Plato's idea inadequate to the fact as to most 
of us, who need a group of at least three oth- 
ers to make a complete and satisfying integer 
of companionship ? 

It is an interesting and yet after all a melan- 
choly reflection that very likely, at this identi- 
cal instant, there is sitting down to a dinner- 
table in London, or putting on his gloves in 
Munich, or walking through the Common in 
Boston, a person who is more nearly akin to 
ourselves, and more fitted in every way to be 
our dearest friend, than any one of those whom 
chance has hitherto thrown in our way. For 
it was chance — or (if we do not like the impli- 
cations of that word) the concatenation of 
causes uncontrolled by our own volition — that 



316 Life 

determined our closest friendship, whatever it 
is. At the very moment we first took that 
hand, some other hand, for aught we know, 
may have brushed by, at no greater distance, 
on the other side, — a hand that might, it is as 
hkely as not, have Jitted our own better in 
every possible respect. How do I know, even 
as I write these words, and dip my pen in the 
ink, and pause, but a letter has been addressed 
in Calcutta or Stockholm which, had it been 
addressed to me, would have renewed and illu- 
minated my whole future life ? But the man 
and I are fated to be strangers. We have 
never met, shall never meet. There is no 
magic telephone threading the air between us ; 
and, if there were, we should only exchange 
some superficial word. Nothing short of living 
some segment of life together can make two 
men into friends. Even letters are of little 
avail. The best of our epistles do not bring 
the deep places of our minds into communica- 
tion. They are hardly more than some less 
abrupt species of telephonic "hello." 

But, for all that, even the oldest and gnarliest 
of us keep somewhere a vague belief in new 
possibilities of intercommunion, and sometimes 
we are moved to sing (under our breath) in 
such wise as this following: : — 



Wanted — A Friend 317 



TO THE UNKNOWN SOUL 

sou], that somewhere art my very kin, 
From dusk and silence unto thee I call ! 

1 know not where thou dwellest : if within 
A palace or a hut ; if great or small 

Thy state and store of fortune ; if thou 'rt sad 
This moment, or most glad ; 

The lordliest monarch or the lowest thrall. 

But well I know — since thou 'rt my counterpart- 
Thou bear'st a clouded spirit ; full of doubt 

And old misgiving, heaviness of heart 

And loneliness of mind ; long wearied out 

With climbing stairs that lead to nothing sure, 

With chasing lights that lure. 

In the thick murk that wraps us all about. 

As across many instruments a flute 

Breathes low, and only thrills its selfsame tone, 
That wakes in music while the rest are mute, 

So send thy voice to me ! Then I alone 
Shall hear and answer ; and we two will fare 
Together, and each bear 

Twin burdens, lighter now than either one. 



ROMANTIC DISPOSITIONS 

What is the essential quality in that view 
of life which we are accustomed to call "ro- 
mantic ? " What is it that constitutes yonder 
amiable friend of ours a " romantic " person ? 
What was it about that pretty notion, expressed 
a moment ago, that made us call it a " roman- 
tic " notion ? To begin with, it is plainly 
something that we regard with disfavor. It 
evidently implies, in a character, a lack of good 
sense ; in an idea, a lack of solid truth. Fur- 
thermore, it appears to belong to the region of 
views concerning the future ; we do not speak 
of " romantic " ideas of what has happened, 
but of what will happen. A " romantic " per- 
son is one who indulges in " romantic " expec- 
tations. Will not this, then, answer for a defi- 
nition ? A romantic disposition is a disposition 
to expect ends without means ; a romantic no- 
tion is a notion that the desirable thing will 
somehow happen, without our having made any 
adequate provision for it. This use of the 
word originated, of course, from the term 
romances ; the idea being that things in real life 



Romantic Dispositions 3 19 

may be expected to turn out as they do in the 
story-books. We must not make the mistake 
of supposing that the romances are therefore 
responsible for the prevalence of romantic no- 
tions. If there is a relation of cause and effect 
here at all, it is the other way round. The 
irrational views of life in the story-books have 
always had their origin in the perennial roman- 
ticism of the human mind. 

For, if we are willing to come to the dissect- 
ing-room for a moment, who of us will not be 
found to have his mind infested with romantic 
ideas of life "i Dear youth, you step up trip- 
pingly to the examination, for you have not yet 
so much as come to the knowledge that there 
are false views of life, — illusions, idola ; as 
yet, whatsoever impressions you find in your 
fresh young brain seem to you, as a matter of 
course, to be the correct, and the only possible 
correct, ones. But, nevertheless, as I tenderly 
remove the os frontis and the dura and the//^ 
mater, there come swarming out a wonderful 
flight of preposterous notions, thick as the 
vague moth-imps from Pandora's casket. And 
you, mature, world-wise citizen, that have ar- 
rived at full knowledge of the abundant exist- 
ence of illusions in other men's minds, — I 
know )7ou for the sport of many a delusive 
expectation ; there are muscce volitantes as big 



320 Life 

as moons dancing about over your wise-look- 
ing eyes. And even you, too, my ancient 
Jacques, my self-confident old cynic, — we un- 
derstand why you have found life a perpetual 
disappointment : it is because you have per- 
petually expected some metaphysical fourth 
dimension of happiness to develop itself spon- 
taneously in your affairs. 

But Francis Bacon said all this much more 
briefly, and therefore much better. " Doth any 
man doubt," quoth he, "that if there were 
taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flat- 
tering hopes, false valuations, iniaginations as one 
would, and the like, but it would leave the 
minds of a number of men poor shrunken 
things, full of melancholy and indisposition, 
and unpleasing to themselves ? " His drift just 
here is to the point that these unsubstantial 
pith-contents of men's brains make, on the 
whole, for contentment and agreeable living. 
But this might well be disputed. In the days 
when the youngsters used to beset me for 
questions suitable to debate in their clubs and 
societies, I wonder I never thought to give 
them this \ Whether illusions be conducive to 
happiness. Bacon, it should be noted, takes 
care to say just afterward, " But howsoever 
these things are thus /;/ men's depraved judg- 
ments and affections, yet truth ... is the sover- 



Romantic Dispositions 32 1 

eign good of human nature." So that after 
all the boys might quote the philosopher on 
both sides of their question. 

''Flattering hopes ;' ''imaginations as one 
would;' — I have italicized these as belonging 
especially to the brain-pith of the romantic'dis- 
position. Do we not know them very well, and 
recognize them as we lean carefully over the 
edge of our mind and peer down into the dark 
mirror of our own consciousness? — the hope 
to have friends without being friendly, and to 
be loved without being lovely ; the hope to be- 
come famous without ever producing "works 
meet for " fame-winning ; the hope to be rich 
without the work or the wit to effect it, or any 
reliable lien on luck that should be trusted to 
help; the hope that j^^ — some definite or 
some " not impossible she " — will fall into our 
arms, unwooed and unwon, like a ripe apple 
into a basket left accidentally under the tree. 
"Flattering hopes," because they all imply that 
we are somehow favorites of the Powers, ex- 
ceptions to the laws of inertia and gravitation. 
"Imaginations as one would;' — not only the 
dreaming of what we wish things were (which 
would be a harmless enough amusement), but 
the dreaming that things are as we wish them, 
— this marks well the distinction between the 
positive or scientific mind and the fanciful or 



322 Life 

romantic mind. The one tries to imagine how 
things really are ; the other tries to imagine 
things as they are not and cannot be. 

There are two little old tales that I like, as 
illustrating romantic expectations in common 
life : one, of the rustic lad, who was sent to sell 
a load of pumpkins in the city, and who re- 
turned at night with his cart still heaping full, 
reporting that he had driven through all the 
streets, and nobody had said a word to him 
about pumpkins ; the other, of the dairy-maid, 
who sat all day in the middle of the field upon 
her milking-stool, and " not a cow came up to 
be milked." 

It is a mark of a great poet when we find 
universal life-truths crystallized into a few lines 
of a poem, possibly for the first time, or cer- 
tainly never so well expressed before. In the 
" Spanish Gypsy," Fedalma is seated on a bank 
in mournful meditation, when Hinda comes to 
bring her 

" A branch of roses — 
So sweet, you '11 love to smell them. 'T was the last. 
I climbed the bank to get it before Tralla, 
And slipped and scratched my arm. But I don't mind. 
You love the roses — so do I. I wish 
The sky would rain down roses, as they rain 
From off the shaken bush. Why will it not.? 
Then all the valley would be pink and white 
And soft to tread on. . . . 



Romantic Dispositions 323 

Over the sea, Queen, where we soon shall go, 
Will it rain roses ? 

" Fcdalma, No, my prattler, no ! 
It never will rain roses : when we want 
To have more roses, we must plant more treesJ** 

Is there anywhere in literature so perfect a pic- 
ture of the romantic and the positive disposi- 
tions of mind ? 



THE GOOD THINGS OF OUR FRIEND 
AS HIS COMPENSATIONS 

Of course unreasonable people must neces- 
sarily be more or less unhappy. The moon is 
always there in plain sight, and nobody to 
bring it to their hand. But it seems as if rea- 
sonable people, in the absence of acute pain or 
especial disaster, might contrive to be reason- 
ably happy. The very phrase contains the lim- 
itation : happy, that is to say, up to the point 
that sound reason could expect, considering 
the inevitables, — the conditions, as it were of 
the lease. 

One of the medicinal truths that would seem 
obvious to any such reasonable person, and yet 
one that we are apt to lose sight of, is this : 
The good thing that our friend enjoys is only 
his particular compensation. We forget, or we 
never have perceived, the otherwise intolerable 
ills of his situation. Seeing only the compen- 
sation, we think it ought to make him perfectly 
happy. We are certain it would make us 
happy, if we had it. 

My city friend, for example, makes me a 



The Good Things of our Friend 325 

three days' visit. I take him on my three 
favorite walks. The first day we go through 
the gorge of the river. The stream, glad to be 
done with its work in the village mills, goes 
dancing down through a deep, rocky ravine. 
Dark hemlocks lean from the cliffs, and others 
below cling with their writhen roots to huge 
cubical blocks of sandstone, fallen in the frosts 
of a thousand winters. Alders, feathery birches, 
and the white stems of sycamores catch the 
sunshine and brighten the interspaces. Mosses 
and ferns soften the outlines of the jagged 
rocks. It is early autumn, and the gay colors 
of unfallen leaves streak the whole length of 
the ravine, with the shadowy hemlock for con- 
trast; and the river, rich brown with recent 
rains, streams along like a curving stripe in 
some splendid agate. When the south wind 
comes soughing up the gorge, it is all one 
solemn song, with river voices and forest voices 
commingled. " Ah ! " exclaims my city friend ; 
" if I could have a retreat like this within ten 
minutes' walk of the ager compascuus at home 
in Botolfium ! " 

The second day I take him to the little silver 
lake that lies like a mirror in its oval frame of 
woodlands. We approach it through a country 
lane, between fields of ripened corn. There is 
a fragrance of apples from farm orchards, and 
we seem to see Keats's " Autumn," 



326 Life 

" Sitting careless on a granary floor, 
Her hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind, 
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep, 
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while her hook 
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers." 

The ruddy western sun throws a long slant of 
shadow from the woods that come close down 
to one sandy margin, keeping off the wind, and 
reflecting darkly in a reach of water so smooth 
as to be almost invisible. From the centre 
across to the opposite shore the breeze con- 
tinually casts and draws its net of darkling rip- 
ples. On its stilt, at the upper end of the lake, 
a white crane stands motionless, and now and 
then a young bass flips winking out of the 
glassy water, as if to dare him from his statu- 
esque repose. " Ah ! " exclaims my friend 
again ; " if I only had this in place of the hal- 
lowed but somewhat unexciting Lacus Rara- 
riwi P^ 

The third day we go the Great Woods, — 
woods of such trees as can be seen only here 
in the Middle West, near the southern shore of 
Lake Weary. A mere New Englander can 
never see at home such stately forest growth : 
white oaks, and hickories, and chestnuts, and 
pepperidges, and tulip-trees. The long aisles, 
carpeted with the first bright fallen leaves, 
stretch far away among straight and towering 



The Good Things of our Friend 327 

columns. Shafts of low and mellowed sun- 
shine light up other aerial aisles ; here tracing 
the sharp shadow of an oak spray against a 
smooth beech bole, there gilding the already- 
golden yellow of a hickory-top, or just flicking 
a quick red squirrel as he leaps from the side 
branch of his chestnut-tree larder to that of his 
oak-tree bedroom. For a moment it is perfectly 
still, and you hear a nut drop, and a chipmunk 
pipe his shrill claim to its possession. Then 
a breeze rustles the top of a pepperidge, and 
tosses out and down an armful of crimson 
leaves. " Ah ! " sighs my friend ; " if we could 
only have all this on the daustrtwi molare /" 

I have vexations, hindrances, depths of 
dumps, with such surroundings ? He would 
not be able to believe it, if I should hint at 
such a thing. 

By and by, when the " winter of our discon- 
tent " is well settled down upon these rustic 
regions, I pay my friend, in turn, a visit of 
three days in Botolfium. He feasts me on pic- 
ture-galleries ; he leaves me blissfully buried for 
half a day in the Minervan library; he elec- 
trifies me with intellectual company ; he intoxi- 
cates me with the symphony concert. " Oh ! " 
I exclaim to myself ; " if these things but grew 
at home in the woods of the Co7iservatio Occi- 
dentalis / He unhappy here ? Impossible ! " 



328 Life 

But when I come to reflect, I am aware that 
he, too, probably has infelicities that he could 
hardly bear but by the assuagement of these 
very compensations. He would most likely 
tell me that it is only by the hardest discipline, 
even with the pictures, and the books, and the 
brains, and the orchestra, that he can put up 
with , and , and ! 

If only the world could have been so con- 
structed as to let us enjoy other people's com- 
pensations, without the ills for which they 
compensate ! Then, 

" This earth had been the Paradise 

It never looked to human eyes, 

Since Adam left his garden yet." 



CHOOSING A CLASS OF PEOPLE FOR 
EXTERMINATION 

In the midst of a queer higglety-pigglety 
dream, last night, I thought the Great Panjan- 
drum appeared to me with the kind offer to have 
some one class of my fellow beings immediately 
exterminated; provided I could, without tak- 
ing too much of his valuable time, decide which 
particular class it should be. Just seven min- 
utes were given in which to make and announce 
the decision. Of course I accepted with alac- 
rity, and at once hastened to run over in my 
mind such of the obnoxious varieties of human 
nature as could most speedily be recalled. At 
first I thought I would select the people who do 
not answer letters ; but I reflected that some- 
times we write letters in haste, which had better 
be answered at leisure, long leisure, or even not 
at all, on the principle that the least said, soon- 
est mended. Then I dallied for a moment 
with the idea that it should be those who, hear- 
ing us say things in joke, straightway report 
them as things said in earnest. Surely, thought 
I to myself, we can't go amiss in having this 



330 Life 

venomous species obliterated ! But as the 
genial destroyer looked at his watch a little 
impatiently, I hurriedly recollected certain 
other deserving candidates. There were those 
who always allow for everybody else's being 
late at appointments, and so afflict the punc- 
tual soul with a quarter of an hour of painful 
fidgets j and those who send us lukewarm 
verses, with a request for an introduction to 
the favorable notice of the editors of the great 
magazines ; and those who borrow tennis-rack- 
ets and sheet-music ; and the book-store attend- 
ants who tag us around with recommendations 
of the latest inanities ; and the botherhood 
\sic\ of locomotive engineers who agonize the 
ear at night with gratuitous shrieks as of whis- 
tling fiends ; and the literary ladies who follow 
up our plainest observations with praise of 
how nicely, or prettily, or nobly, or something, 
it was said. 

" Six minutes and three quarters," whispered 
the Grand Panjandrum, punching at me with 
his sceptre, and knocking his little round button 
at top against the ceiling, as he hastily rose. 
I made one more rapid snatch among my recol- 
lections of people who are with difficulty to be 
endured, and cried, "Take those who carry a 
perpetual countenance of cold displeasure, and 
contrive to make each member of the house- 



Choosing People for Extermination 3 3 1 

hold, or the company, feel that he is at all 
times the special object of it ! " The depart- 
ing monster nodded benignly over his shoulder 
and winked, as who should say, "You have 
chosen well ! " 



THE NOUVEAU CULTIV^ 

The noiiveaux riches, as a class, have been a 
good deal before the public, and their appear- 
ance and habits, both in the wild state and 
under domestication, are pretty familiar to all 
keen observers of the wonders of natural his- 
tory. But there is another class in modern 
society, equally noteworthy, and in some re- 
spects even more preposterous and disagree- 
able, that seems to have escaped classification. 
It is that species of person whom we may de- 
nominate the nouveau cultive. Sprung from 
illiterate stock in some uncivilized region, he 
has suddenly been plunged into an accidental 
penumbra of culture when well along in years. 
He has been " caught late." He has, accord- 
ingly, a most vivid appreciation of those things 
which seem to him to mark the difference be- 
tween his present advanced position and his 
previous backward state. The little that he 
now knows is very conspicuous to him and to 
his relatives. His faith in certain second-rate 
makers of public opinion, especially since he 
has traveled and has seen the Building where 



The Nouveau Ciiltive 333 

these powerful things are produced, is very 
touching. He has religious convictions con- 
cerning the greatness of Washington Irving 
and Fitz-Greene Halleck, and perhaps of 
Young, Pollock, and Mrs. Hemans. He has 
read that Jeffrey said to Macaulay, " Where did 
you get that style ? " and he, too, wonders 
where such a magnificent thing could have 
been found. Sometimes he copies passages, in 
hopes to acquire it for his own contributions to 
the county paper. He loves to quote from 
"quaint old" this one and that one; and has 
bought, but not yet read, a copy of Chaucer, 
because, as he is proud to explain to his family, 
he was a " well of English undefyled." His 
wife has presented to him a brief handbook 
of the history of art, and they have learned 
a good many of the dates. This gives them a 
contempt for the plain people who like and 
tack up woodcuts and still take comfort in 
Christmas-cards. They have read a little of 
" Dant," not without some secret struggles with 
the " I-talian " names ; and greatly commis- 
erate those who have not the advantage of 
familiarity with "Doar's " great illustrations. 

All this is before the nouveau cultive moves 
to the city. At that epoch the interesting 
creature enters on a second stage of develop- 
ment, but still very late. If the first was that 



334 Life 

of the larva, this is that of the chrysalis ; but 
it is too far along in the season ever to pro- 
duce a perfect butterfly. If the larva was 
active and aggressive, the chrysalis is appro- 
priately cold and impassive. It has acquired 
a shell, and has a glazed expression of counte- 
nance, indicative of mysterious processes going 
on within. The man has mastered the code of 
dress, equipage, and etiquette ; and so lately 
that he is greatly impressed with these things, 
makes his daughters and nieces shed tears for 
their errors, and rarely misses, himself. He 
not only acquires the correct pronunciation of 
" clever,^^ with the genuine imported chiar-oscuro 
of the final syllable, but he learns to apply the 
word to the proper books and persons, and 
does this with almost painful frequency. He 
is wonderfully sure of the received verdicts on 
works of literature and art. If you happen to 
question any of them, or intimate a preference 
for some new man, it is comical, and yet a little 
vexing, for all your philosophy, to see how your 
lifelong weariness of the old orthodox judg- 
ment is taken for that ignorance of it from 
which he himself has so lately emerged. On 
the other hand, it is with an exquisitely bene- 
volent condescension that he gives you the last 
twaddle as superseding your view of some one 
of the immortals. 



The Nouveau Cultivd 335 

There is, however, one consideration that 
should reconcile us to any and all of the social 
infelicities connected with the existence of this 
class of the nouveaux cultives. It is the fact of 
the better outlook for the next generation that 
comes from even the slightest lift to this. If 
the father only gets so far as to perform awk- 
ward and ludicrous antics on the front door- 
steps of culture, the children will certainly have 
a better chance of entering in than if he never 
had come out of the woods at all. 



THE LEFT-OVER EXPRESSION OF 
COUNTENANCE 

There are certain humorous sidewalk obser- 
vations that are open to one as a kind of com- 
pensation for having to elbow and jostle along 
the public ways. One of these is the trick 
people have of looking at you with the left-over 
remainders of the expression of face just be- 
stowed on the companion with whom they are 
walking and talking. A pair of persons en- 
gaged in lively argument are approaching you. 
One of them is laying down the law with great 
vigor of facial and muscular gesture. At the 
moment of brushing by he glances at you, with 
the ferocious scowl of his fervid eloquence still 
puckering his features. You would think he 
was your bitterest foe. Of course it would be 
opposed to the great law of economy of force 
to have relaxed and then puckered up again 
just for the momentary meeting of another 
face. Perhaps his apparatus of facial expres- 
sion is not agile enough to have accomplished 
the manoeuvre if he had tried. 

Shortly after, you encounter Saccharissima 



Left-Over Expression of Countenance 337 

and Dulcissima, chatting and laughing together 
as they come. They are entire strangers to 
you, but as you pass you receive a most capti- 
vating smile, — from both of them this time, 
as it happens, for both are talking at once. 
It produces an effect like those momentary 
streaks of warm air through which one sud- 
denly walks on an autumn day. 

Sometimes you get a mixed expression, with 
much the effect of a stream of warm and of cold 
water poured on the head at the same time. 
The eyes, which are the more mobile portion 
of the expressional apparatus, will nimbly alter 
their look, at the instant of meeting you, to 
that freezing glance appropriate to the encoun- 
ter of an un-introduced fellow creature. The 
mouth, meanwhile, with its attendant cheek- 
curves, continues the companionable smile, 
thus bridging over the interruption, and allow- 
ing the conversation to go on with its atmo- 
sphere unchanged. 

Occasionally it happens, however, that the 
mixture was already in the original expression. 
We all know that blood-curdling look which 
passes between eminently civil people, wherein 
the eyes remain distant and stony, while the 
unfortunate mouth (which — for its sins, per- 
haps — always has to do the hypocrisy for the 
whole countenance) is forced to maintain an 



338 Life 

expansive mechanical smile. Thus I meet, of 
a morning, two middle-aged ladies engaged in 
polite exchange of views upon the weather. 
Rival boarding-house keepers, possibly. The 
effect now is quite complex. They are already 
wearing, for each other, the mixed expression 
referred to, and in glancing at you each infuses 
an additional drop of vitriol into the ocular 
and adjustable part of her look. This momen- 
tary contact with expressions that were in- 
tended for other people is singularly noticeable 
on the road in meeting open carriages. Some- 
times on a crisp afternoon, when everybody is 
out and all are animated, it is like encounter- 
ing an intermittent running fire of faces : some 
real rifle-shots (such as Emerson describes), 
and with explosive bullets at that ; others, the 
mere sugar-plum artillery of the Carnival, — 
and none of them intended for you particularly. 
It is merely that you happen to intervene in 
the line of fire. An effect of this sort is when 
two crowded open horse-cars meet and pass. 
Here you have, not single shots, but the simul- 
taneous discharge of a whole battery of divers 
facial howitzers. 

Perhaps the oddest case of this persistence 
of previous expressions is where you have 
stopped a moment to speak with a lady on a 
village sidewalk. You are only slightly ac- 



Left-Over Expression of Countenance 339 

quainted, and neither your mutual relation nor 
the business in hand calls for anything but a 
very indifferent and matter-of-fact cast of coun- 
tenance. But suddenly, in the middle of a 
sentence, this daughter of Eve is aware of a 
favorite young gentleman bowing and smiling 
from a rapidly passing carriage. Without mov- 
ing her head, — there is not time for that, — 
but only her eyes, she flashes on her vanishing 
friend a bewitchingly intimate smile. Then 
she instantly looks back to you and finishes 
the business sentence, with the remains of this 
charming but now queerly incongruous glance 
fading out of her face in a most interesting 
manner. It is like watching the last tint of 
sunset vanishing from a mountain peak, or a 
pretty little wave ebbing back on the beach, or 
the closing of a flower at night, or the putting 
up of the shutters on the village apothecary 
shop at bedtime. 

I remember an appalling instance of such a 
phenomenon that occurred to me when a child. 
Even at this late day, whenever I vividly recall 
the scene, it gives me a chill. It was in a 
Virgil class, and I was a poor little palpitating 
new scholar. While I was anxiously constru- 
ing the opening lines of the Dido-in-the-storm 
episode„the beetle-browed master turned slyly 
to a privileged older pupil with some sotto voce 



340 Life 

schoolmaster's joke. As I glanced up, having 
partly heard the words without catching the 
point, he was just turning back to me, with a 
most genial and winning smile sweetening his 
usually acid features. Innocently, and no 
doubt with some timidly responsive look on my 
face, I said, " What ? " But on the instant of 
speaking I divined that, alas ! the grin was not 
meant for me. It was a case of left-over re- 
mainder. As it ceased to " coldly furnish forth " 
his rapidly congealing countenance, he bade 
me in a stern voice to " go on." It was much 
as if he had cried, "What right h^Neyou to be 
smiling at me, you miserable little sinner ? " 

But I have known over-sensitive persons of 
larger growth to have their disagreeable mo- 
ments with these "remainder biscuits" of ex- 
pression. For example, I have an unhappy 
friend who has all his life been intermittently 
ridden with the idea that he is in some way 
ridiculous. I can never find him really happy 
and at his ease except in his library or his 
garden. The books and the chickens, he says, 
do not laugh at him. Whether it be the effect 
on his nerves of tea-drinking, or of living too 
much alone, or of having been brought up by 
homespun people, to whom his artistic tastes 
really did appear ridiculous, and who took no 
pains to conceal the fact, — whatever the 



Left-Over Expression of Countenance 34 1 

cause, there is nothing of which he has such 
terror as the " laughter of fools " directed 
against himself. Lately I set myself seriously 
to combat this fancy. I said, " Let us go out 
together on the street, or into company, and 
see if you can show me any reliable instances 
of people's laughing at you." 

The first persons we happened to encounter, 
after leaving the house, were two sauntering 
schoolgirls, satchels on arm, maxillaries active, 
and one was telling the other with infinite 
secrecy — as if the very lamp-posts were sure 
to be listening — some wonderful experience, 
such as only schoolgirls have. As my friend 
and I approached them, it appeared that the 
climax of the narrative had just been reached. 
Glancing up at us unconsciously, as we met, 
they continued to giggle, and passed on. 
" There ! you see ! " said my friend. And I 
had much ado to convince him that it was only 
a case of left-over expression. 



THE KEEPER-IN AND THE BLURTER- 
OUT 

Two good friends of mine have now for 
years stood to my mind as types of two oppo- 
site dispositions with regard to secretiveness. 
The one never seems to say anything without 
pausing first to consider within himself whether, 
after all, it might not be better not to say it. 
The other seems never to let any 

" Craven scruple 
Of thinking too precisely on the event " 

hinder her from the utterance of whatever she 
has to say. The one I call a keeper-in ; the 
other, a blurter-out. It has been an interest- 
ing study with me to observe these two charac- 
ters, and the results of their two methods both 
on others and on themselves. 

The keeper-in would appear, at first sight, 
to have all the wisdom on his side. He cer- 
tainly has the support of all the " little hoard 
of maxims." Do not the proverbs all preach 
a sharp surveillance of that " unruly member," 
the tongue.? Did not the Greek philosopher 
wag his hoary head, and aver that he had often 



The Keeper-In and the Blurter-Out 343 

been sorry for what he had said, but never for 
what he had refrained from saying ? Does not 
George Sand testify that, in her experience, 
words are always dangerous except when they 
are necessary ? And sings not warningly the 
German poet, — 

" Am Baum des Schweigens hangt 
Seine Frucht, der Frieda " ? 

Nevertheless, I am compelled to record, as 
the result of my own observations, the opinion 
that the least harm and the most good have 
come from the method of the blurter-out. And 
why not ? Are we to admit that there is, on the 
whole, more evil than good in people's minds 
to be expressed ? Can we believe that " winged 
words " are oftener envenomed arrows than 
bearers of good tidings ? 

No doubt there is a kind of confidence which 
the keeper-in inspires among his friends. We 
know that if we impart a secret to him it is 
safe. We are sure that in any deliberative coun- 
cil, where a word is to be fitly spoken only at a 
certain moment, he will not go off semi-reti7ia- 
culum. If the success of an undertaking, or 
the peace of a family, hangs on silence, he will 
be "golden through and through." But then, 
on the other hand, we are equally and sadly 
sure that if there suddenly comes a crisis in 
our affairs, or in public affairs, where a quick, 



344 Life 

courageous utterance is the indispensable thing, 
the keeper-in can be relied on to fail to utter 
it. It is true that, in talking with him at my 
fireside, I can relate to him with perfect confi- 
dence the good story of my catching our neigh- 
bor at my hen-roost ; but then, how can I be 
sure that our neighbor has not been to him 
with just such a merry tale (lacking only the 
basis of fact) about me ? How do I know that 
he esteems me as a truthful and virtuous man, 
when I am aware that he would look me in the 
face with the same inscrutable repose of man- 
ner if he suspected me of being a liar and a 
thief? 

But with the blurter-out, on the contrary, I 
know just what she thinks of me, and just what 
she does not think of me ; and I know that she 
knows that I know, and is glad of it. The 
only anxiety she appears to have is lest people 
should suppose she thinks more of them than 
she does. I have observed a little stir of ap- 
prehension in a company when she enters the 
room, or the conversation. No one knows 
exactly what she may say next. And it is a 
pretty thing to see the way in which a certain 
kindly relative of hers will anxiously bend for- 
ward as she talks, ready to whisper a gentle 
and nudging " Now, Jane ! " 

I admit that the keeper-in avoids some awk- 



The Keeper-In and the Blurter-Out 345 

ward situations, and that the blurter-out gets 
into a certain amount of hot water. It might 
be urged by some that the best course would 
be a happy mean between the two. But, for 
my part, I would rather risk it on the penalties 
of the impetuous truth-teller than to adopt any 
sort of a happy mean that consists in being 
meanly happy. 



OLD MORTON 

The Middle-Western village produces, or 
confirms into inveteracy when produced, many 
a queer type of character. In the same way 
that isolated valleys in mountainous countries 
develop and preserve distinct idioms of folk- 
speech, so do these isolated semi-rustic regions 
exhibit odd dialectic varieties of human nature. 
One such queer character, or " odd stick," is 
remembered in our village as " Old Morton." 
Bent at a crooked right angle, weather-stained 
and storm-beaten, like a sort of land species of 
ancient mariner, gray, unkempt, and his arid 
face visibly consoled by perennial founts of 
tobacco, the old man was wont to hobble 
through the village street about once a day, 
usually at mail-time. For he, too, it was clear, 
like all the denizens of little towns, and espe- 
cially those without either correspondence or 
business, had always great expectations in con- 
nection with the unknown possibilities of each 
day's lean but punctual mail-bag. His only 
employment and means of support consisted of 
chance jobs of small joinery in a rickety little 



Old Morton 347 

shop on the bank of the river, in the loft of 
which was his lonely and unseen lair. There 
never was a more inoffensive creature ; he was 
very gentle with small children and all piteous 
dumb animals ; but his bent-over face had a 
splenetic gaze down at mother earth, — say, 
rather, step-mother pavement, — as he made 
his way along the street, and his old blue 
eyes looked up at you with a sort of protesting 
hostility, as if, in the absence of a visible Pro- 
vidence, he took you for a representative of 
things in general and accused you of his fate. 
I was comparatively a new-comer in the town, 
and had never exchanged greetings with him ; 
but one day, as I was hurrying across the stone 
bridge, he met me, and stopped me with the 
paralyzing exclamation, '■'• Aiii't ye glad ye ain^t 
old Morton/" I was never more nonplused 
and put to it for a reply. What I did respond 
was, " Who ? — I? " But whether this counter- 
interrogative of mine meant anything or not, I 
have never known. The particular nuance of 
my own inner consciousness that prompted my 
words had, in my astonishment, evaporated 
with them, as I found upon asking myself what 
under the moon I had meant, while I hurried 
on my way. His words I understood well 
enough, and perhaps mine may have been 
meant to convey some sudden sense of my 



348 Life 

small reason for any such self-gratulation. But 
it is quite as likely my mental breath was so 
completely taken away that I made the re- 
sponse in entire idiocy. 

I learned afterward that it was a habit of his 
to address this or a similar question to persons 
of his acquaintance. His constant idea seemed 
to be that, whatever the apparent hardness of 
any other mortal's lot in life, it ought to be a 
sufficient consolation to him to reflect that, 
after all, he was not Old Morton. 

There was philosophy in the reflection, and 
I was glad to have imbibed it. In fact, what 
right had I to grumble and sulk about things, 
so long as I had not the weak and friendless 
old man's bent back, and rheumatism, and 
shattered nerves, and forlorn abandonment ? 

Once I was waiting at the provision store, on 
some family errand of " harmless necessary," 
soap, or sugar, or other village bricabrac (such 
as it is the pleasant privilege of the literary man 
of the household, with his apparent plenitude 
of leisure, to purvey), when I saw the ancient 
philosopher, sitting on a cracker barrel, and 
gazing at a pair of urchins whose tow heads 
barely reached the counter. There was a kind 
of quizzical and melancholy tenderness in his 
look. " There 's one good thing about them 
boys ! " he exclaimed with emphasis, as he 



Old Morton 349 

caught my eye. « They won't neither one on 
'em 7iever be Old Morton !'' And he evidently 
felt that in pronouncing this decisive judgment 
he was, as it were, a benignant oracle, decree- 
ing them a blessed fate. 



